The final day at Jump in Camp started with a very hungover breakfast due to the festivities of the brewery and card games the night before, surprisingly quite a few people made it in time for the talk by Jason Stowe on Spatial Data this is a topic I have been interested for quite some time and Jason’s talk and demonstrations only made what I thought was already a really cool thing into an awesomely cool thing!
One thing that is surely lacking in a UK standpoint is access to Free Geo-spatial data for the UK which would allow some pretty awesome tools to be built, I am going to spend some more time looking into this to see if I can find a free source, if anyone knows of any please feel free to get in touch,
The rest of the morning and the afternoon was used for people to get back to the coding and start implementing the things we had been looking into over the last few days, I spent the afternoon working on Web Platform Installer to look into how we can get osCommerce to install smoothly on a Windows machine, some more details of this work will be available soon.
Soon it was time for some people (including myself) to head back to Zurich Airport to catch our respective flights home, for myself it was a close call and I made it with just 5 minutes to spare before the plane left without me!
Final Thoughts
Looking back on the few days spent in Switzerland I am amazed by what was achieved in just a short space of time, a large part of this is down to the brilliant minds that were provided by Microsoft and the brilliant organisational skills of Nicole Zahnd, in my mind this camp was a resounding success and I hope they have many more of these in the future.
Allowing the open-source projects direct access to the people in Microsoft who can help them make a difference just made the whole process simple and it was a refreshing look into the heart of Microsoft and surprisingly not everyone there is a “borg” style drone, they have some brilliant people working who have a real passion for open-source software and interoperability.
I would like to say thanks for all of the people from Microsoft, Futurecom and of course all of the others who attended, together you made it an awesome few days for myself, I hope to have chance to meet everyone again at some point soon.