Several deadlines are approaching to turn in proposals for conferences and events, most notably FOSS4G and Google’s Summer of Code, and we are currently working out what we would like to present. This is a great time to get input from the community to see what you would like us to talk about, demo, teach, and share with everyone. So lets talk briefly about the two events and what we have planned so far:

FOSS4G: This year it is being held in Victoria BC, Canada, and is a great conference to learn about everything geospatial that is open source. Last year we presented a three hour workshop to teach people the basics of setting up and using GeoServer. To plan for this year we would like to start by getting input now on what you would like us to cover. So far we have proposed doing more than one workshop: a basic one and a more advanced one. The basic workshop would cover: installing GeoServer, simple WMS queries, simple WFS queries, and some work with SLD. The advanced workshop, if we have one, could contain a number of topics from advanced WFS-T to creating your own GeoServer plugins in Java. If you have any ideas on what you would like to have us talk about, please let us know. We want to make sure you get the most out of the conference.

Google Summer of Code: This provides a unique opportunity to get your hands dirty with some open source code and get paid at the same time! We are thinking about an entry or two and have started a discussion page. Jot some ideas down on the wiki page or talk about it in this blog post. We are open for any ideas. Current ideas we have are: an SLD editor, GPS to shapefile tool, a server use/availability Google desktop widget.