AGI announces Professor Iain Stewart as Guest Compère at its annual awards evening - 13/11/14.

The Association for Geographic Information (AGI) is pleased to announce Professor Iain Stewart as Guest Compère at its new annual awards evening – The AGI Awards for GeoSpatial Excellence -  to be held at the Chesford Grange Hotel, Warwickshire, during the evening of November 13th 2014.

The AGI Awards are a prestigious event recognising the very best achievements in the field of Geographic Information throughout the year. The purpose of the awards is to recognise excellence within the industry and to foster a spirit of innovation to the betterment of Geographic Information in the UK. This year marks the 25th anniversary of the AGI and as a result the AGI has launched an exciting new set of awards for 2014 and beyond! The AGI Awards for Geospatial Excellence move beyond the traditional sector based approach to generate an open and engaging competition for each award relevant across the whole industry! For more information about the awards and how to nominate yourself or your project please visit: http://www.geobig5.com/events/agi-awards-geospatial-excellence/. 

The deadline for nominations is 30^th September 2014.

About Professor Iain Stewart:

Iain Stewart, professor of Geoscience Communication at Plymouth University (UK), is an Earth scientist and broadcaster who specialises in recent geological change. He has presented major television series for the BBC on the nature, history and state of the planet, most notably ‘Earth:  The Power of the Planet’; ‘Earth: The Climate Wars’; ‘How Earth Made Us’, ‘How To Grow A Planet’; ‘Volcano Live’, and ‘Rise of the Continents’. He regularly fronts BBC Horizon specials on geoscientific topics, such as the Japanese earthquake, the Russian meteor strike, Shale gas/ Fracking, and Florida sinkholes. In 2013 he was awarded the American Geophysical Union’s Athelstan Spilhaus Award for conveying to the general public the excitement, significance, and beauty of the Earth and space sciences.

Geo: The Big 5 - News Round-up

Big Data (IBM, London, 30 Sep) in Partnership with the Demographics User Group – programme online, book now!

There is still chance to book a place for this highly anticipated event and gain insight into one of the hottest topics in future IT thinking. The AGI’s Big Data event features world leading experts from big data (IBM, Cloudera, MapR, Deloitte), major commercial users (Marks and Spencer, Telefonica) and geospatial sectors (Esri, Ordnance Survey). Two parallel streams will run through the day, one focussing on Strategy and the other Best Practice. The conference is accompanied by an exhibition and the full programme can be viewed here.

Geocom - The Changing Face of Geo (Chesford Grange Hotel, Kenilworth, 11th-13th Nov) - early bird ends 12th September

This year’s new format Geocom (marking the AGI’s 25th year) will see talks from leading industry speakers and Government Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Mark Walport. Talks will explore the challenges, opportunities and business benefit of integrating geospatial with a host of other tools alongside skills focused workshops, hands on training and an innovation theatre. Regardless of your sector or interest GeoCom will allow you to debate, engage with and shape the future of the geospatial industry. Logistics information and the conference registration form can be found online.

 AGI Awards for Geospatial Excellence (Chesford Grange Hotel, Kenilworth, 13th Nov) - still time to gain recognition for your work

There is still plenty of time to submit an entry for the AGI Awards for Geospatial Excellence and be recognised for your achievements in and commitment to geospatial in 2014. Detailed descriptions of our ten prestigious awards are available on the Geo Big 5 site. 

Getting Ready for Summer at the AGI

I've managed to find time from website specs, CRM user stories and PR plans to write the first blog in ages. It’s very very warm in the office which must mean it’s nearly time for the summer holidays so before everyone disappears to somewhere exotic and exciting I thought I’d give a quick preview of what you’ve got to look forward to when you come back.

GeoBig 5 - Big Data:

The next of the GeoBig5 events is looking at big data from both the perspective of how technologies and practices can and are impacting geospatial data collection and analysis and the opportunities provided by so much big data containing a geospatial element. The full programme will be released next week for what’s going to be a great event at the IBM hub in London on 30 September.

GeoBig 5 - Policy:

The final one day event of the GeoBig5 series will be exploring both the implications of policy on geospatial (INSPIRE, Open Data etc) and also the positive impact geospatial can have in informing policy decisions. The call for papers for this event closes on the 1 August so there is still time to submit. The event takes place in Cardiff on 9 October.

GeoCom ’14:

The culmination of the fantastic GeoBig5 series. Having been at the recent planning meeting and paper selection for this event I can safely say GeoCom ’14 is going to be something special and unlike any previous AGI conference. As well as having secured Sir Mark Walport (Government Chief Scientist) as our keynote we’ve got a mixture of presentations, lightning talks, workshops and training that will make the whole conference a lot more vital and dynamic. GeoCom ’14 takes place between the 11 and 13 November at the very pleasant Chesford Grange Hotel, earlybird booking with a 10% discount is still open.

Awards:

The final event of the year and a fitting end to 2014 will be the new AGI Awards for Geospatial Excellence. Replacing the previous AGI awards these will take a much broader and more outward looking view of the industry to promote and recognise excellence and innovation. Compared by TV’s Professor Iain Stewart (A great evangelist for the power of Geography and GI) this will be a great showcase for the industry and a chance to see some of the great ideas from 2014. This will take place on the 13 November at the Chesford Grange Hotel following on from GeoCom. Awards submissions are still open.

Website:

The project that has been absorbing my blogging time is well underway and the new look AGI website should be greeting our members as they return from their summer holidays in September. Complete with content hub, best practice documents, space for SIGs and other AGI groups to interact the new site will provide both a showcase for the AGI and UK GI and a resource and benefit for our members.

And Finally

It’s hot, the evenings are bright and we’re not quite ready for summer yet so why not come along to the next AGI Geodrinks on the 23 July? These are being hosted by the Insurance and Risk SIG at the Crosse Keys (extra e not a typo) on Gracechurch Street, London. Its an Insurance and Risk event but other Geo talk is more than welcome!

Big 5, GeoCom and the call for Abstracts – Why you should submit!

Over half of the one day Geo: The Big 5 events have taken place now and the feedback from delegates, sponsors and speakers has all been excellent. The themed events have really added a new dimension to the AGI programme and have catalysed debate and the debate is changing.

A common point that has come through all of the events so far is how interconnected all the issues are and how collaboration of ideas and technologies across sectors is key to furthering the positive impact geospatial can have. Related to this is in increasing feel the GI and geospatial have gone ‘mainstream’ to the point that many people using these technologies and techniques don’t even realise that is what they are called. GI is just one of the tools businesses, governments and other organisations are reaching for to help them make better and more efficient decisions.

This growth bring a whole host of challenges and opportunities and massively increases the audience for whom GI is relevant (whether they call it GI or not). GeoCom will seek to tackle this head on with varied content from that aimed at policy makers with no technical experience to workshops seeing to grow practical GI skills.

Get Involved!

The call for abstracts for GeoCom ends on the 30 June and I cannot stress strongly enough that this is your chance to get involved in the debate! There are crucial conversations to be had and you can help frame the debate by speaking at one of the events. The submissions process is simple this year and all you need is a short abstract (more details here). With shorter and longer presentations, debate sessions and workshops there are more ways to get involved in the most interactive GeoCom ever.

The call for papers for the remaining Geo: Big 5 events (Big Data and Policy) is also still open with deadlines of 20/06 and 01/07 respectively. This is a great chance to influence the debate at the last two events of this exciting series. Both of which will help to inform the discussion at GeoCom and the AGI Foresight Study for 2015.

Don’t forget you can also submit your paper to be considered in the AGI Awards for Geospatial Excellence taking place at the end of GeoCom.

Come Along!

Obviously we also encourage you to come along. With early bird prices from £290 for two days packed with content, debate and workshops (as well as networking and the exhibition) GeoCom represents great value and a very different event to last year. You can view details and book here.

With presentations ranging from the technical to the strategic there will be content for ‘hardcore’ GIS users as well as strategists, CIOs and the like so if you are a long suffering GI manager drag your boss along to reinforce the value of the expertise you provide!

Re-branding, Websites and GeoCom ‘14

I apologise for the sparse blogging over the past couple of weeks but I’ve been rather preoccupied with the three items above (and the other Geo: Big 5 events). The good news is that this work is paying off and we’ve made loads of progress to update people on.

First up is the branding, as many of you may have noticed (especially delegates at Future Cities) we have been working on a new brand. The old AGI brand has served well over the years but has become fragmented and a little dated over time. 

With the work being undertaken on a new AGI website we wanted to ensure that we had a clean and consistent new brand so this combined with the 25^th anniversary seemed like the perfect opportunity to undertake a rebranding exercise.

 More information can be found here but we feel the new brand gives a very clear visual statement that the AGI wants to make sure that it is doing all it can to be relevant in 2014 and beyond. The new brand is much more than just a logo and will reflect how we communicate within and beyond our industry going forwards and builds on a lot of work that is being done behind the scenes as to who we are and what we stand for.

We have created a page with the various brand resources on which can be found here.

Next up and probably most exciting for most of you is the work being done on a new website. Our current website is a little dated to say the least and places a lot of limits on what we can do so the decision has been taken that rather than attempt to re-skin and tinker with it we are going for a whole new site. 

I am lucky enough to be one of the small group working with the developers on the new site and I can already say it is going to be a vast improvement. We want the site and the member’s area to become a content and knowledge hub for the industry and will be populating it with news, features, interviews and content from passed events among other things.

As always the success of this will depend on our members and we will be making it accessible for SIGs and other groups to edit and add content that is interesting to them. We welcome comments from members on what content they might like to see and also if there is anything they would like to contribute. The new site is expected to go live in late June but in the meantime we have launched an interim site just for Geo: The Big 5.

Finally we come to GeoCom – ‘The Changing Face of Geo’, the change in name partly reflects a desire to move from an inward looking community to an outward looking group engaging with wider industry and partly because everyone just shortened it to GeoCom anyway. We visited the venue at the start of April and it is fantastic and a very different space to the EMCC. Not only is it a very nice looking country hotel but it also has an awful lot of different meeting rooms. This is going to enable us to run a lot more workshops and hands on training sessions (as the majority of delegates have requested). As a result we’re going to be delivering a GeoCom that is a lot more varied than last year with the core focus being on getting really good content and speakers.

Anyway more on GeoCom will follow as we finalise the programme and the speakers but in the meantime have a look at the new brand and think about what you might want to see on the new website.

Sponsor Feedback and GeoCom '14 - David Henderson

David Henderson the AGI Vice Chair has kindly provided me with a brief report of our visit to the fantastic new GeoCom venue last week:

Along with the AGI Team and some fellow Council Members, last Thursday I attended a meeting of AGI Suppliers SIG at the Chesford Grange Hotel near Warwick where we will hold this year’s GeoComm conference on the 11-13 November. 

The meeting allowed some of our corporate members – 1Spatial, Dotted Eyes/MISO, GGP systems, Sterling Geo and Ordnance Survey – to give some further feedback to the AGI events team (this year chaired by Rollo Home) and for us to have a tour of the conference facilities.

Whilst the move away from Nottingham will bring some inevitable changes to the look and feel of our annual conference, I am really excited by the fresh new opportunities that Chesford Grange Hotel will afford to the event – the food was quite tasty too!!

At AGI we’re really excited about how our 2014 events programme has begun. You can read more about the fantastic success of our first event, hosted by AGI Scotland national group, in Glasgow last month. Members travelled from across UK to participate in some very high quality discussion and debate.  Our events programme complete with new branding and sponsorship opportunities can be found here.

We’re delighted that both ESRI(UK) and Ordnance Survey have committed to Diamond Sponsorship for 2014 and equally pleased to have agreed event sponsorship packages with so many of our other corporate members. Our 2014 event programme in particular has been developed in conjunction with our Suppliers SIG and is giving an important platform for the geographic information industry to discuss many of the big issues that are impacting and presenting opportunity for our members. Plans for 2015 have already started. If you’d like to get involved in any of our events or discuss sponsorship then the AGI Team or any member AGI Council would love to hear from you.

In the meantime, we look forward to seeing as many of our members as possible at the next Big 5 event in Belfast on 13 May.

Call for Papers and Geo: The Big 5

The call for papers for Geo: The Big 5 is now open and we have already received a number of abstracts. However it has emerged that there is some confusion over what can be submitted and where and just as importantly who selects it. The idea of the submissions page on the website was to keep things as simple as possible as it has been suggested that the somewhat convoluted admissions process has put people off in the past.

The first point to note is that we are running the call for all events at the same time so if you have a paper that you would like to present at the Big Data event in September you can send it in now.

Secondly it is very important to reiterate that there are two streams at each of the single day Big 5 events (more at GeoCom) and this is reflected in the call for papers. Each event has a theme (Future Cities, Open Geospatial etc) and we welcome paper submissions under the relevant theme for each event. This will take up one stream at the event designed to cater for a UK wide audience. The selection of papers for this stream will be undertaken by the events Action Working Group (AWG) with advice from relevant SIGs.

The second stream at each conference will consist of case studies and best practice from the wider field of geo that are of interest to the local area (and we’re taking a broad definition of local here). For example for the Future Cities event in Glasgow there will be a second stream of content populated by case studies showcasing the work of Scottish organisation and at the Policy event in Wales there will be case studies form Welsh organisations and so on. The local National/Regional group will be heavily involved in selecting the content for this stream (alongside advising on the main stream). The ultimate goal being to have an event that is significant across the UK GI industry that also provides a forum for the constituent nations and regions of the UK to showcase issues and work that is of interest to the local GI community.

Finally if you have a great paper on Future Cities for example but can’t make the Glasgow conference we will also be carrying the Big 5 themes into the annual conference (along with some others) so you can always submit now to present it there. The GeoCom conference will be wrapping up the themes from the other conferences and the best papers from each of the one day events may well feature.

Basically we don’t want to put people off applying, the Big 5 themes are there to guide the debate through a series of exciting events not to be a barrier. If you have done something exciting and innovative in GI then the AGI want to hear about it and give you the chance to show it off to the wider industry!