Building on the success of last year’s GeoNode summit, folks representing Eldarion, GFDRR, Harvard CGA, MapStory, OpenGeo, SpatialDev, WFP and others met at Harvard University. The summit was designed to get many of the major GeoNode partners together to coordinate around a shared development roadmap and commit resources to following through on it.
On Monday, February 6th, the first day of the summit, each participating organization presented on how they’re using GeoNode, what they’ve accomplished since the last summit, and what their primary goals and concerns are in the coming year (here presentations from OpenDRI, WFP, and WorldMap) .Following these reintroductions, David Winslow, Chair of the GeoNode Project Steering Committee, presented on the state of the software with a particular focus on the state of things on Github.
On Tuesday, February 7th, we discussed current development efforts, brainstormed ideas about GeoNode features, and used a dot-voting exercise to sort through roadmap items. Issues that were discussed as community priorities include a well-documented public REST API, offline support with synchronization, and better installation and migration. We also highlighted active development efforts from across various projects and organizations; contact the geonode-org mailing list to get involved in or influence these efforts:
- As part of GFDRR’s OpenDRI project:
- Improved search
- Improved printing
- CSV/Excel upload support
- KML upload
- As part of the MapStory project:
- Annotations
- Temporal data support
- As part of the WorldMap project:
- GeoRSS layers
- Geocoding and reverse geocoding
- “View only” permissions
For the remainder of the week, GeoNode developers sprinted on improving the GeoNode core. Among the improvements were:
- Integrating pull requests from the GeoNode GitHub project.
- GeoNode localizations for Greek, French, Indonesian, and Chinese locales. Thanks to the GeoNode community members who’ve helped with these translations.
- Improvements and additions to the GeoNode documentation.
- Refactorings to make GeoNode conform better to Django conventions and thereby provide an easier development environment for Django developers.
In addition to these outstanding patches from the community, the sprint also saw some new work:
- Integration of the South migration framework to simplify the deployment of future GeoNode features and bugfixes.
- Group code review exercise to share knowledge and best practices for GeoNode development.
- “Clean up” some existing branches in order to create more pull requests.
- Improvements to GeoNode’s infrastructure to better support metadata from extensions such as ITHACA’s document mapping.
In summary, it was a productive week for GeoNode.
