So I went to check out the website for Qatar's government GIS group, the Center for GIS (http://www.gisqatar.org.qa/), for the first time. Even if you are not in the region, it is amusing for a short list of reasons.

- The landing page is Flash based. Who does Flash welcome pages anymore?
- Oh wait, the whole web page uses annoying sound effects, thanks to egregious reliance on said Flash.
- Did not even bother go beyond the Map & Data Sales link. I guess I can expect a lot from them in terms of open data. I cannot wait to read their policy document (http://www.gisqatar.org.qa/new/maps/images/Policy.pdf).
- My favorite part: the "forums" is nothing more than ESRI's ArcGIS forums. That is it. Clearly, GIS is just a synonym for ArcGIS. There is nothing beyond its infinite scope!

Needless to say, I cannot wait to use this website. I want to find out more about Doha's bizarre zoning system (more on that later), and I cannot imagine the website is going to be helpful . . . at all.

So, I have been working here for about a month. As the wiki page says, OSM has a lot that can be done in Doha, and Qatar in general (if you really think there is much to do outside of Doha in Qatar, anyways). I have put some stuff up the talk page for WikiProject Qatar, but I never heard back.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:WikiProject_Qatar

I only see one user registered in Qatar, and it seems like he is one of the expat/visitors here like I am. Not even sure if he is still around. I would like to build consensus on things here (for starters, should we be mapping with primary name as Arabic or English), but I am not sure what resources exist for me to reach out to users other than individually. That being said, it appears the OSM community is small here at best, at worst fractured and non-existent. Hopefully, I will make some headway soon once my schedule opens up.

What a wonderful event this was today. Initial reports indicate that the event might have taken in around ~400 people. Despite my very limited knowledge of the barcamp style, it is went excellently. My one complaint was that we were killing bandwidth, but the OSM crew was like ~30 strong on a commodity wireless router, so I am amazed we did not bring it down a couple of times. An excellent job and I hope to work on this during the evening and keeping it up with the LA folks as they start their event up now.