Last week James Milner and his organising committee staged a brilliant FOSS4G UK at the Geovation Hub. For the first time in ages I wasn’t organising a FOSS4G (well I did help with some financial bits and pieces), I wasn’t presenting (except for a lightning talk) so I could just hang out listen to interesting speakers and learn some cool stuff in the workshops. Here is what I enjoyed in roughly chronological order): Day 1 […]
FOSS4G
17 posts
Thanks to the enormous efforts of the FOSS4G 2017 organising team the videos of keynotes and presentations are now appearing on their site. There were a couple of technical glitches when I was giving my FAKEMAPS talk in Boston but fortunately the video finally appeared with sound, slides and me. Get your self a cup of coffee, a beer or even a single malt, sit back and hopefully enjoy, it’s worth making the video ‘full […]
This is my last post on the 2018 FOSS4G Travel Grant Programme (but you can look forward to several more about the 2019 TGP). I wanted to share some of the feedback that I have received from the TGP recipients. In case you have forgotten, you can donate to the 2018 TGP now. My name is Mayra Zurbarán, I am from Colombia (not Columbia!) and a PhD Student at Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, Colombia […]
FOSS4G just gets better and better, perhaps it’s the delight of being on a geobusman’s holiday rather than being the conference chair? I’d been in conversation with Michael Terner and Guido Stein, the co-chairs of FOSS4G 2017, for over a year in my role as a past chair and member of the OSGeo Conference Committee. I know how much passion and effort they and their team put into bringing FOSS4G to Boston, their vision and […]
Sometimes a glitch can work out. I had been worrying how I was going to get through over 60 slides in my FAKEMAPS presentation (plus builds) in 20 minutes, I cut and cut but still thought I might have to do a hard stop somewhere before the spectacular end. Stressful. The FOSS4G team had asked presenters to use their laptops that were hooked up for recording, they suggested PowerPoint format or PDF (no Keynote). […]
I am sitting at FOSS4G with a little smile on my face. We have just handed out the last of ten travel grants to people who would not have been able to have make the trip to Boston without our support. When you meet these people and hear a little more of their stories you know how important it is that we enable more people to experience FOSS4G. This year we crowdfunded over $1,500 to […]
I have recently been chatting by mail with Bernard Muhwezi who is the Manager of Geo-Information Services at the Uganda Bureau of Statistics. Bernard is attending FOSS4G in Boston this year, he told me about what had happened in his country since he returned from FOSS4G 2013 in Nottingham, (Bernard authorised me to share this mail) I attended FOSS4G Nottingham, and collected materials and CDs and trained in QGIS, when I came back I trained 54 mapping […]
FOSS4G starts in Boston in just over 3 weeks time, there will be close on 1000 attendees (could go higher if you are one of the late registrations) learning, sharing, networking, having a bit of geofun, making new friends and building the Open Source Geo community. There will be hundreds of presentations, workshops, keynotes, lightning talks, birds of a feather, meet ups, loads of QGIS and lots of new stuff. So who wouldn’t want to […]
For almost a year now, Marc Vloemans (Eclipse Foundation) and I have been thinking/talking/planning a workshop on Sales & Marketing for SMEs that we are presenting at FOSS4G in Boston in August. It is coming together well, or at least we think so, and we are excited about it’s first airing. We both have a background in sales and marketing and have spent the last decade or more in geospatial, however the workshop is not […]
Apologies, there may be a bit of gushing in this post. Last week the German Chapter of OSGeo hosted the annual FOSS4G event in Bonn. Each year the Local Organising Committee of FOSS4G wants to make their event the ‘Best FOSS4G Ever’, in 2013 the Nottingham team adopted that mantra as one of our hashtags on twitter. This year the Bonn team have really raised the bar and set an incredibly high standard for those that follow […]
I travelled home from FOSS4GUK in Southampton yesterday afternoon on something of a high, we had had a great 3 days and at the end England had scraped a sneaky win against Wales in the 92nd minute (seeing Gareth Bale cry can’t be bad, can it?). Then I saw the awful news about Jo Cox and I was flattened, what the fuck is wrong with our world? This morning I realised that whilst our little […]
Today I did a Q&A with the Early Careers Network of the AGI. Much of it was fairly uncontroversial stuff about career plans in GI and some trends. My main focus was on choosing a good employer that provides opportunities, career progression and growth rather than being too worried about how much GI you were going to do. Somehow I slipped in the proposition that GI was not a profession and the future would be about […]