208 The last year has has been a been a momentus one in the history of geospatial free and open source software. The launch of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation brings our community to a new level of organization and legitimacy. The mission of OSGeo is "To support the development of open source geospatial software, and promote its widespread use." An exploration of goals, and committee activities gives a more detailed sense of the priorities and ambitions of the foundation. The foundation has had a number of accomplishments so far. Establishing the machinery of the organization, hiring an executive director, establishing an incubation process, bringing OSGeo to influential conferences and in the press. It has also gotten a good start on a variety of initiatives including promoting use of our software in the educational realm, and public geodata initiatives. But many challenges and opportunities remain. We are just starting our sponsorship drive. Some software projects are struggling to complete incubation. We need lots of help writing web content, white papers, and other materials to serve our "compass" tagline claims. We need help building out servers for our various needs. We need people doing outreach at shows, to communities and to projects. Bio: Frank Warmerdam is an independent geospatial open source software developer, and has been working on the GDAL/OGR library for seven years. Previous to that he was a senior developer at PCI Geomatics for six years. In 1991 he graduated from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor of Mathematics, majoring in Computer Science. He is also an occasional contributor to many other open source projects, winner of the first annual Sol Katz award, and is currently President of OSGeo. FOSS4G2006 - Free And Open Source Software for Geoinformatics Welcome and Opening Conference Plenary Frank Warmerdam warmerdam@pobox.com Frank Warmerdam warmerdam@pobox.com <MaKaC.conference.ContributionType object at 0xb49ad4ec>