I was invited to deliver a keynote last week at KortDage to an audience of nearly 800 Danish (and Scandinavian) GI professionals. There were just a few snags:
- The person who invited me said “Last year Jack Dangermond gave a keynote, this year we wanted something different”. No challenge there!
- The slot was at 9.00am on the final morning after the delegates had been up till 1.30am boogying
- I don’t speak Danish and I wasn’t sure how my dry (I’d like to think) Brit humour would go down
So they wanted something different, they liked my #FAKEMAPS talk, I didn’t have a lot of time to come up with something completely new so I decided to re-invent Sh*thole Geography.
Ken Field and I had done a double act at FOSS4G in Dar es Salaam around Donald Trump’s opinion that some countries were “shithole countries” whose citizens were not welcome in the US. We had riffed on the “Orange Clown” as Ken likes to call 45, we had played with UN Sustainable Development Goal stats, Ken gave a brief cartography master class on making global maps and I had created a pub style geography quiz. I could work with that and switch the focus to make a slightly different message for this audience (with apologies to Ken) – a map may not always be the best way to present global statistics.
They didn’t record the whole talk so I can’t share that with you but you can get the drift of the points I was making from this short interview that the organisers did with me after my talk.
Kortdage 2018 – Kort fortæller ikke altid sandheden from Geoforum on Vimeo.
At the end of the talk I offered Sh*thole Geography badges and stickers to the attendees in return for donations to the FOSS4G Travel Grant Programme – the audience were amazingly generous and we raised almost $500
Apart from my talk I also got to meet Anna Webber, an artist who had made an “earth map” of Denmark
You can read more about her map and why she made it on Ken’s and my Mappery site.
Thanks to the organisers for inviting me to speak, thanks to all the people who laughed at my jokes and made me feel welcome. KortDage was a great event.
