I wasn’t looking forward to FOSS4G North America. The political and economic situation in the US made it much more difficult to attract sponsorship dollars. The government shutdown and the precedin…

Once again, FOSS4G North America is bringing together the people shaping the future of open-source geospatial technology. This year, it takes place November 3–5 at the Hyatt Regency in Reston, Virginia, just a few miles from the centers of federal decision-making where open data, open tools, and open collaboration appear to be increasingly at risk. I’ve attended and helped organize FOSS4G NA for a few years now, and the 2025 program stands out for how clearly it reflects the direction our field is heading. The sessions, workshops, and conversations all point to a few unmistakable trends: the convergence of open-source geospatial with artificial intelligence, cloud-native data, and enterprise-grade interoperability.

I mentioned in my previous post that, at a previous career stop, I built open-source support into our IT lifecycle. Specifically, we used QGIS. The primary reason we made that choice is that we were a Mac shop. It's true we could have run ArcGIS Pro inside Parallels, but I didn't see the need to pay the "VM tax" in terms of performance to use software that was essentially a match in capability to QGIS, which ran natively on MacOS.

You are already using open-source. I've said that time and again to various audiences. The most committed Microsoft and Esri users will immediately balk, but it's easy to knock the objections down. Azure? Linux abounds. Esri? GDAL under the hood. And what does the "Py" in ArcPy stand for? Oh yeah, Python, the open-source programming language. You're already using open-source, even if you don't know it.

I have no problem with vibe coding. Yes, you can make bad code with it, and quite easily. The worst way to vibe code is to issue a monolithic prompt like "Build a word processor with the features of Microsoft Word." But using techniques like chain-of-thought or plan-and-solve prompting in an iterative manner can yield pretty good results. Not perfect - you'll still have some last-mile editing to do - but it can provide a pretty good jump start.

For outstanding contributions to any of the core tools, systems, processes or resources. Not limited to systems under OSMF control. The Rails port, osm2pgsql, openstreetmap-carto, iD, JOSM, mapnik…

For two decades, the Homeland Infrastructure Foundation-Level Data (HIFLD) Open portal was the bedrock of U.S. disaster response and community planning—a free, authoritative map of the nation's most c...

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