No rest on Saturday in Moscow

On the 11 of December my wife an I arrived to the Leningrad railway station in Moscow.  I always try to achieve two or more goals with a single effort so the goals of this trip were to take part in the GIS-Lab party and to let my wife spend some time with her friend Marusia.

It was my 3-rd night running to spend in a train and on the way back I was going to equal my previous 4 nights running record established this November with a business trip St. Petersburg → Petrozavodsk  → Kosomuksha  → Petrozvodsk  → St. Petersburg and all trips were in night (unfortunately there always were no more than 7 hours to sleep). Actually for the last 3 weeks I had to work extremely hard and slept for 4-6 hours per day. I was so tired that on the way to the wife's friend in metro I used a well known opportunity to sleep in the train on the circular line. It is a really cool thing this circular line)))

Our first goal was to meet Marusia. On Friday we received a message from Marusia that she is in hospital now.  On Tuesday she decided to dye her hair in some hairdressing salon with a very expensive dye. A hairdresser performed some kind of allergy test with her which showed that Marusia had no allergic reaction with this, but... The next day an ambulance took her with a swelled face to the hospital for allergic persons. 

After the hospital my wife and I moved to the Manezh Centrall Exgibittion Hall to take a look at the photographic exhibition. At the Manezh Square we saw a lot of youngsters who looked like a soccer fans. Many of them had masks on their faces... An hour and a half later when we wanted to leave the Manezh Hall, the security told us that the doors are sealed and no one able to enter the building or leave it. The reason was unrest. 

While the raged mob tried to break in, people captured inside the Manezh Hall remained calm but little bored with a necessity to stay inside for a while. Luckily  there was a cafe ion the 3-rd floor We used an opportunity to eat something and take a nap.  Fortunately mindless hooligans were hurled back  soon and the pass to the metro was cleared.

We were only 20 minuets late to the GIS-Lab party - the main event of the day. It was a first time when I was able to take part in it. Twice before I wanted to come, but every time some obstacles prevented me from the trip. Even this time my employer asked me to work on Suturday despite I worked for 14 hours per day without holidays over 3 weeks (but it is another story), and these hooligans who captured us inside the Manezh...

I was glad to see people whom I knew only by virtual communication at the forum ind IRC. An interesting notice: at least 6 people (1/3 of all participants) at the party related to the ecology. I'm confused with conclusions but never the less...

A future plans of the community development were discussed. Maxim Dubinin told that he wants to save some time for his personal life and delegate some of his functions to the some kind of council. This step in GIS-Lab community development should also improve its sustainability. Of course it is necessary to transfer responsibility, but the process might be somewhat painful for the person who was in charge for all these years because the opinion of the future council might be quite different to his own. Discussion about the sandbox for the GIS-articles is an example. It was hard but the participants convinced Maxim to give a chance to the some kind of personal blogs instead of wiki to write the articles about GIS.

There was a brief discussion about the commercialisation of the GIS-Lab, but it ended up with the strong opinion of the majority that this will not gonna happen anytime soon and if this ever will occur it will destroy the community.

Another topic was future GIS-Lab's projects. I proposed creation of the data set of the conventional signs for QGIS. All the more the new symbology in QGIS is a powerful tool, but the initial data set is extremely poor. There were other interesting proposals and they will be described in the official blog of the GIS-Lab along with other topics of the meeting (link to the report). 

Unfortunately we had to move to the railway station and leave some interesting topics behind. I didn't even said goodbye properly because we were talking about issues with spatial data access, while I was dressing up and leaving the room. 

They told me that the next meeting will take place in January... I highly doubt, but I will  be waiting for the next meeting - that's for sure.