As I’m sure you all know FOSS4G was in the UK for the first time ever
last week, taking place in Nottingham directly after GeoCommunity ’13. The
conference itself lasted three days (19th – 21st
September) but was preceded by two days of workshops and a hackathon.
Unfortunately as these first days ran consecutively with GeoCom I wasn’t able
to attend any of it so all I can say in review was that there seemed to be a
lot of people happily coding away. Even if I had been able to go to the
workshops I imagine they may have gone over my head a little anyway.
The main event kicked off with the icebreaker party on the Wednesday
night straight after GeoCom ended (with a break of a few hours in which we frantically
registered delegates). Due to back to back parties at the AGI conference I
sadly left the icebreaker early but by all accounts it was a fun evening.
The serious business began the next morning with opening speeches from
Jeff McKenna and Chris Tucker reviewing the state of OSGeo and looking at the
Open sector in general. There was a lot of focus on the F in FOSS4G and whether
it was now more realistic to talk about Freedom (from licensing) than just
Free. This became somewhat of a continuing theme throughout the conference both
in keynote’s and informally at the bar and perhaps signifies a growing to
maturity of the Open community and the acknowledgement that just because
something is non proprietary that doesn’t mean money will not be made from it
in some way.
Anyway, business philosophy aside the main sessions of FOSS4G were
extremely varied offering presentations ranging from the technical and detailed
(mobile development, versioning guidelines) to higher level case studies (The
Met Office’s Open Journey). Fortunately the organisers had helpfully marked up
some sessions as being for newbie’s so I managed to enjoy the conference
without feeling like a complete idiot. It even inspired me to download some
software and have a go myself (results of my map mapping foray may me on the
blog at a later date...).
One thing that looking across the conference programme trying to decide
what to go to really brought home was the ubiquity of Geo Information. Now I
realise that I was already aware of this to an extent and have even written a
blog post about it but I had never really thought of GI as a potential tool for
helping indigenous communities in the Amazon contest their land rights or a
variety of other humanitarian applications. Similarly prior to GeoCom I had
never really thought of GI as a tool for experimental scientific research
(beyond simply mapping a hurricane or ice sheet loss).
Anyway again I digress but hopefully that gives some picture of how
informative the conference was. One final piece to mention that follows on from
my comments about the opening speakers is Esri’s presentation to FOSS4G. I understood
that there can be a tension between the open and proprietary camps but it was
only when someone described it as ‘Darth Vader presenting to the Ewoks’ that I
realised that it was actually a pretty big deal that they had come out and
presented to a very tough crowd. Again this seems to show a change in attitude and
recognition that both open and proprietary solutions have their place in the
market.
I realise this review isn’t as much of a review as I would like but if
I had spent all week attending sessions and workshops I wouldn’t have been able
to help register people and point the way to things. One amusing observation is
that given it was an open source mapping conference an awful lot of delegates
needed directions...
Anyway if anyone has the chance to attend more workshops and talks than
I did and would like to post up their own review that would be most welcome and
the same goes for GeoCom ’13 attendees.
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