mcwhirter.com.au/craige/blog/2014/LCA2014

These are my raw notes from talks held on Tuesday at LCA2014. May contain errors, mis-heard quotes. Also completely un-reviewed or spell checked:

Why Open Street Map?
- Most other maps are not free
Goal: Free map of the world
Facilates global responses to contribute map data to help in emergencies
The earthquake in Haiti was the first example of how OSM cold be used to support emergency responses
HOT trained Haitians how to map to continue the work
In collaboration with what AusAid they commenced pre-emptively mapping Indonesia.
The idea: Map once - avaialble for everyone
OSM was adopted entusiastically by local authorities
Community is continuing to train members
Now mapping Jakarta
- There are 267 urban village heads
- Trained each hed and a volunteer
- 70 university students entered the data
- Allowed flooding reports to be mapped during later flood crisis
HOT train locals on OSM and qGIS
Used QR codes on walking papers so smart phones were not required to be provisioned
Accurate map data allows better planned emergency responses
Wrote a training programe so people can be certified
HOT use the OSM tasking manager.
Agencies like Red Cross using OSM to build other GIS tools
After Haiti, US Gov recognised the benefit of providing imagry to volunteers like HOT.
- Provided imagrry to HOT with 5 days of the typhoon Haiyan in the Philipines
1,700 people have made 5 millions changs to OSM in response to the typhoon
Other Apps building upon OSM:
- Field Papers allows maps to be printed
- Mango Map
Part of digital humanitarian network

Got a free shirt. Thank you OpenStack!
How To Contribute
OpenStack bugs tagged low hanging fruit are a great way to get started in OpenStack

Designed to be open and collaborative
Two governance bodies, technical and a board that tend to be removed from technical roles and strategically focussed.
Ceph is not part of OpenStack, governed seperately but can be utilised.
Nova, essentially a hypervisor management tool, is agnostic about the virtualisation architecture being used.
Devstack is a great intro to OpenStack to run up on one box.
Swift is an object store.
Voting eligibility is based upon accepted patch providers

OpenStack was started 3 years ago.
NASA and Rackspace kicked it off with mutual synergies between Nova and Swift.
Over 13,000 contributors
Joining is free
Releases are every 6 months
Followed by summits to roadmap the next release
- User and business summits are held at the same time
20 official projects
Current key community questions:
- Deciding what is "core"
- Implementation vs API compatibility
- Scaling training
Very fluid project with an open potential

Original idea behind hardware virtualisation was to maximise utilisation of hardware
Erasure codes provide space-efficient storage, ie: storage virtualisation
Storage policies are (will be?) the most exciting thing to happen to SWIFT, since it was open sourced

Run two regions on seperate versions of OpenStack and flip them for upgrades
MaaS and Juju to deploy to bare metal
Juju provides Canonical's service orchestration. Heat is the OpenStack equivilent
Improved service density
Operating expenses are down
True reproducitity of deployments has been a big win.