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.