Will there be an OSGeo Desktop shootout at FOSS4G 2010?

Delegates who voted for the FOSS4G 2009 presentations ranked the OSGeo comparison projects very highly, which is something I suggest hopeful FOSS4G 2010 presenters take note of, because competition for speaking slots will be fierce.

At FOSS4G 2009, 183 quality presentations were submitted, and there was only 85 speaking slots. In 2010 it is likely to be much harder, as there is expected to be 2 to 3 times more delegates and many more hopeful presenters.

In 2009 the community ranked potential presentations, and some of the highest ranked presentations targeted the comparison of popular packages. Unfortunately, there were only a few of these types of presentations.

The presentations were:

• Ranked 2: The WMS Performance Shootout
• Ranked 8: PostGIS and Oracle Spatial
• Ranked 9: There is no alternative to Openlayers...? (discussing OpenLayers vs other AJAX clients)

The moral to the story is that delegates want to see how different projects compare, and to date we have had a shortage of such presentations (partly because they are a lot of work to set up).

However, I strongly suggest that projects start teaming together to put together such presentations for 2010.

In particular, I'd love to see comparisons between:

• Geospatial Desktop applications
• Geospatial Browser based applications
• Geospatial Servers (WMS, WFS, Tiled Services at the very least)

The comparisons could cover some or all of:

• performance
• robustness
• features
• ease of setup or use

The tests should not be restricted to Open Source, but be open to proprietary vendors too. (ESRI and ERDAS were invited to participate in the 2009 WMS shootout, and it seems likely they will participate in 2010).

So who wants to participate?