Eclectic, geo, fun, beer, talking late into the night – it must be #geomob

If #geomob didn’t exist someone would have to start it, actually Chris Osborne did back in 2008 and then Ed Freyfogle took over from him a few years ago. I don’t think I or any of the hundreds of attendees (probably close on a thousand by now) have thanked Chris and Ed enough for what they have given to the map mad, geogeek community in London. Here goes …

If you haven’t been to a #geomob, you are missing out on a great evening’s geofun and some free beer (courtesy of the growing list of sponsors – OpenCage Data, SplashMaps, Pusher, what3words, Esri UK and me). Wednesday evening was a great example, about 60 or 70 people rocked up at the British Computer Society near Covent Garden (other venues include UCL, Google Campus and OS Geovation Hub) to listen to speakers talking about low cost drones for humanitarian mapping, discovering places, ranking properties by desirability, Open Historical Map (routing on early Roman highways!) and mapping bird migrations.

Now personally I am a sucker for a drone, particularly when some crazy guy decides to fly the thing round a room full of people! There are loads of catch phrases and advice about doing live demos, Ivan Gayton trashed them all, you can see what happened.

[youtube ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yBHm5qLKrg&Rel=0[/youtube]

It was tough work for the speakers who followed Ivan but for a finale Liz Scott blew us away with her, dry, funny and fascinating talk about mapping bird migrations, who knew about “ringing birds”?

The talks at #geomob are only the beginning, the questions (banter) from the audience, the twitter back channel and of course the inevitable “So, what’s your business model?” are what gives #geomob its character. And then we go to the pub and the conversation kicks off, we usually keep going until closing time.

The next #geomob is on September 30th, you can sign up here. If you have got something interesting, funny or plain mad to talk about that includes, geo, mobile, maps or place, ping Ed Freyfogle and he will find you a slot.

I am off to start building a drone from waste materials or maybe I will ring a bird or map a Roman road