Social Media and getting involved with Maptember

Apologies for the gap in blog posts, I have been on holiday. As was pointed out the comment on the last blog entry there are of course other smaller but still very helpful ways to get involved with the AGI. Whilst it is true that we need volunteers and council members to function every day actions like tweeting to/about the AGI, taking part in a discussion on LinkedIN or speaking to a colleague or friend in the industry are all extremely important.

Very conveniently we have the perfect opportunity for our members to get involved on social media (of course we encourage you to get involved anyway this is just a good excuse to talk about it). Anyway that opportunity is ‘Maptember’ the month formerly known as September.

What is Maptember?

September sees a considerable pile up of events in the Geo Information and Spatial arena with our very own GeoCommunity taking place alongside State of the Map, FOSS4G and a number of other smaller conferences and events. Obviously such a concentration of events at one time has the potential to saturate the community but also provides an opportunity to give momentum and focus attention within the GI community, something which the AGI of course supports.

In honour of the geo heavy nature of the month the FOSS4G organising committee have come up with the idea of renaming it Maptember.

Apart from being a solid pun what does this mean?

This has two major practical applications the first of which is the creation of the http://www.maptember.org/ website listing all the events included. It is not entirely apparent if all of the smaller events are aware they are included in ‘Maptember’ but this is clearly a great opportunity for delegates to find other relevant conferences they are interested in.

Secondly, and this is where we would call on our membership to get involved is the creation of the #maptember. This hashtag allows people tweeting about the various conferences to make their content easily searchable and gives the semblance of community t

o the various contributors. We would encourage all of our members who are tweeting about GeoComm ’13 to included #maptember in their tweets. As the only permanent UK fixture of the big Maptember conferences (FOSS and SotM will be overseas next year) it seems only right that the AGI takes a prominent place in all the twitter traffic, somewhere where our members can really help.

Oh and there are T-Shirts...

That’s right you can purchase your very own Maptember T-Shirt at GeoCom ’13. The proceeds from these go to the excellent charity Map Action (who by happy coincidence are our supported charity for the conference). If I didn’t already have an AGI shirt to wear I would be very tempted to get one of these...

Thanks,

Chris