OpenGeo

You may have noticed that we have recently rebuilt our website. Here are some new sections you might find helpful:

• The OpenGeo Suite Matrix now explains the differences between our three OpenGeo Suite contracts: Basic, Professional, and Enterprise.
• The Core Development Roadmaps describe the features we plan to build into the projects we support (GeoServer, OpenLayers, PostGIS, GeoWebCache, and GeoExt) as part of our mission. You can hire us to develop these features; because they are on our roadmap we will work for a reduced rate.
• We have devoted part of our website to tell you more about who is on our team. Many of our team members are luminaries in the open source geospatial world, and we want to tell you all about them.

Take some time to explore the new website today and tomorrow, as we will be updating its content often over the coming weeks.

OpenGeo has embarked on a company-wide retreat this week. Since the members of our team work in six different countries on three continents and across ten time zones, we are quite used to working together remotely. With OpenGeo growing in size, however, it is worthwhile for all of us to meet in one physical location for the first time to articulate our roadmap and goals for the future.

So we’ve alighted at a small farm in upstate New York, spending the next few days working hard and playing hard. While we are not coding much (we’ll be code sprinting this upcoming weekend), we are meeting together to decide how we can most effectively pursue our mission in our world. We will detail the results of this meeting in the weeks and months to come.

We are thrilled to welcome Paul Ramsey to the OpenGeo team.

Paul has made a name for himself in the world of open source geospatial software as the founder of Refractions Research and leader in the PostGIS, GEOS, and uDig projects, for which he was honored with the Sol Katz award in 2008. A director of OSGeo, he has throughout his career been a vocal proponent of the robustness of open source geospatial software.

Paul joins us as a PostGIS expert. At last able to offer consulting and support for that software, we can now endorse PostGIS as the root of our OpenGeo stack. We welcome also his experience as OpenGeo grows to a new stage of social enterprise–and his eminence and eloquence as an advocate for the Open Geospatial Web.

You can find Paul’s thoughts on joining OpenGeo on his blog.