Finally find some time to write up some thoughts about the first edition of the ORFEO ToolBox users day which was held in Toulouse at La Serre last week. An average of 20 people attend each day to the conference, it was a great event which will help to start new cooperations and allow lots of interesting discussions about the project.

It  started with presentations of new functionalities of the last version of OTB (5.0) which was released 2 weeks ago. This session was also the opportunity to present the open governance for the project which was announced in March. This initiative aims in encouraging people and organization to join the effort and participate more actively in the evolution and the decision process of the library. I think that most people well understand this approach and will join the effort to provide high level guidance and coordination for the ORFEO ToolBox and guarantee that OTB remains open and company neutral.

The afternoon was devoted to presentations on how they use OTB, what they like about the software and also what could be improved. It well illustrated the diversity of the way that OTB is used. I started to gather all the presentations on the OTB slideshare account (keyword: hackfest2015).

The second day was all about workshops with a tutorial which allows to see in practice the new modular architecture of the library and how to build easily OTB and its dependencies thanks to the superbuild mechanism. Then we follow with a brainstorming session which allows to have some enlightening discussions about the orientation of Monteverdi2 (the desktop application based on OTB). It was also the occasion to see how we can interact more deeply with QGIS to improve the support of OTB applications in the processing framework and we also discuss what could be the objectives and the orientations of the next OTB releases. For sure all those discussions will guide and help to build the roadmap for the next versions.

Tutorials and materials used during the workshop are all available in OTB-Documents repository.

The last day was (almost) all about development. Some works in small group was done  to finish up the tutorial and consist in developing a enhanced version of the TileImageFusion application (soon available in the library).  It was also the occasion to prototype some new cool features in the library.

I personally really enjoyed participating in this first edition, it was a great opportunity to talk to all the users, developers and have interesting discussions to hear how the software we produce is being seen and how it can be improved. For sure we will perpetuate the organization of such event in the future.

You can find some photos of the conference here.

Thanks again sincerely to all the participants and sponsor (CS-SI), I’ll really encourage everyone to join the ORFEO ToolBox community  and I hope to see you next year!

Manuel