A couple “culture notes” since it was brought up

Geotools (freenode#geotools) has regular IRC meeting on Monday, if you want to engage us formally to solve a problem show up and grab an agenda item. Grabbing is done by typing a line like “3) Is someone willing to make a smallworld datastore”. Most of the discussion in meetings here is RnD related, but someone is usually online around the world so show up and have fun.

And Ask questions, we will point you to the right documentation page – often we don’t know what documentation is in use or useful. IRC is how we find out. There is also a specific geotools users mailing list.

http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOT/3.1+Internet+Relay+Chat

GeoServer (freenode#geoserver) is going global in a big way for their GeoServer 1.3.0 release and requires *two* IRC meetings. While there documentation is now first rate (amazing improvement team), the meeting times is a great oppertunity to formally engae the community.

http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOS/IRC

uDig (freenode#udig) also keeps an online presense round the clock and round the world. Given the small body of developers fenetic pace of improvements as teams start up around the world nobody has slowed down for formal meetings. One of the most active areas is translations for example.

Aside for developers: uDig culture those is in *marked* contrast with the warnings above. We are putting together our developer documentation in a “lazy” fashion – based on your questions in IRC. Since we use so many mainstream technologies often we did not need docs as the topic was covered by our collective book collection. That said the uDig developers docs are some of the best online sources Eclipse RCP.

http://udig.refractions.net/confluence/display/UDIG/Community