GeoNetwork-ui code sprint in Berlin

At the end of January, we organized the first GeoNetwork-ui code sprint in our Berlin offices.

We were about 15 people from different countries, companies and backgrounds - developers for most, but also architects, product owners & project managers.

GeoNetwork-ui is a library and a suite of applications made to provide a modern facade to any GeoNetwork catalog. It also provides web components to embed various parts of a data catalog in third party websites. 

It is used quite extensively by several applications like the Swiss geographic catalogue, Lille’s OpenData catalog, the French IGN’s maps portal, Renne’s public portal for geodata, INRAE’s geodata portal, and many INSPIRE regional portals like those of Brittany, Hauts-de-France and Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. 

The 3-days sprint brought different opportunities, like (of course) getting to know each other, but also sharing experiences, knowledge and questions about the future of the library. 

We mostly focused on the final bits towards the release of a stable and production-ready metadata editor, but there was also room for other improvements like welcoming maps and reuses into the datahub, end-to-end tests and more exploratory ones like server-side rendering (improves Search Engine Optimization).

It proved very useful and productive but most importantly it allowed for many people to learn and be more familiar with the project as experienced members could spend time onboarding newcomers.  

We plan to organize more code sprints in the coming months - stay tuned !