FOSS4G 2013

Press Release 6th May 2013

Jo — Fri, 03 May 2013 16:38:00 +0000

The Draft FOSS4G’13 Programme is released!
The FOSS4G community has spoken! The open voting process (http://2013.foss4g.org/press-release-10th-april-2013/) closed with a record response of people sifting and reporting on their favourite submissions from a selection of over 320 abstracts. It clearly wasn’t always an easy choice, and the Local Organising Committee (LOC) had a challenge to distil the responses down into an eight stream programme: that still leaves just over 200 papers, presentations, and workshops for the FOSS4G’13 delegate to choose from! There really is something for everyone here – and lots of it, from ‘deep dives’ to ‘guided introduction tours’ of all the major applications, case studies, applications and just some plain odd-ball stuff!

To make the process of navigating the agenda as simple as possible a tagged programme for the presentations is available at http://2013.foss4g.org/provisional/, while the workshops can be viewed at http://2013.foss4g.org/provisional/workshops/. The final programme will be announced on Monday 17th June. For any number of reasons we may have to accommodate author changes, making the programme provisional up until that point. The LOC would really like to give a huge shout out to all those people who contributed abstracts and proposals – we’re hugely grateful. And a big congratulations to all those whose submissions were successful! Now all that remains is for you to register. The Early Bird discount closes on May 31st. To sign up simply visit: http://2013.foss4g.org/registration/.

Notes to the Editor:

About FOSS4G (2013.foss4g.org): FOSS4G is the global conference for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial, hosted by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and organised by a Local Organising Committee. FOSS4G will be held in the United Kingdom for the first time in 2013, at the East Midlands Conference Centre (http://www.nottinghamconferences.co.uk/emcc/) in Nottingham, from 17th to 21st September. FOSS4G 2013 will follow on from the Association for Geospatial Information (www.agi.org.uk) annual GeoCommunity event held in the same venue. These two conferences form a part of the geospatial focused events happening across the UK in September (www.maptember.org).

About OSGeo (www.osgeo.org): The Open Source Geospatial Foundation, or OSGeo, is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support the collaborative development of open source geospatial software, and promote its widespread use. The foundation provides financial, organizational and legal support to the broader open source geospatial community. It also serves as an independent legal entity to which community members can contribute code, funding and other resources, secure in the knowledge that their contributions will be maintained for public benefit. OSGeo also serves as an outreach and advocacy organization for the open source geospatial community, and provides a common forum and shared infrastructure for improving cross-project collaboration. The foundation’s projects are all freely available and useable under an OSI-certified open source license http://www.opensource.org/licenses/.

Media Sponsorship: FOSS4G would welcome the support and encouragement of media sponsors. Full details are available at http://2013.foss4g.org/media-sponsorship-package/.

Logo: The FOSS4G logo can be downloaded from: http://2013.foss4g.org/Style/.

Press Release 2nd April 2013

Jo — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:14:54 +0000

Double Diamond! Met Office join Ordnance Survey as FOSS4G Diamond Sponsors

OSGeo are delighted to be able to announce a second Diamond sponsor for FOSS4G to accompany Ordnance Survey: The Met Office.

The Met Office, like Ordnance Survey is a familiar name to many (and is in fact ranked in the top ten of 2012′s Social Brands 100), but perhaps, like Ordnance Survey, few realise the full range of services that it provides.

As the UK’s National Weather Service, the Met Office is the global leader in providing weather and climate services, employing more than 1,800 people at 60 locations throughout the world. It provides key services such as public forecasts and warnings as well as services to defence, aviation, transport, energy and renewables both in the UK and internationally.

Similarly to Ordnance Survey, it is a Trading Fund within the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, and operates on a commercial basis.

Both the Met Office and Ordnance Survey have made significant commitments in promoting the use of their OpenData, providing resources to facilitating the uptake of the open data.

Ian Edwards, Senior Software Engineer at the Met Office and Chair to the UK Chapter OSGeo commented “The Met Office is very excited about supporting such an important Open Source event as FOSS4G; as an organisation the Met Office is hugely committed to providing data, software and resources at the disposal of the developer community”.

The Met Office will be hosting a developer hackathon during FOSS4G (http://2013.foss4g.org/additional-options/) as well as showcasing their open source SciTools (http://scitools.org.uk/) as well as Met Office Data Point (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/datapoint) – a way of accessing freely available Met Office data feeds in a format that is suitable for application developers.

Ordnance Survey, long term proponents of open data (http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/products/os-opendata.html) will be demonstrating their new cartographic offerings within QGIS and the OpenSpace API (http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/web-services/os-openspace/api/index.html).

Notes to the Editor:
About the Met Office: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us

About Ordnance Survey: http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/about-us/our-history/index.html

Media Sponsorship: FOSS4G would welcome the support and encouragement of media sponsors. Full details are available at http://2013.foss4g.org/media-sponsorship-package/.

Logo: The FOSS4G logo can be downloaded from: http://2013.foss4g.org/Style/.

Time to Vote

Antony — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 22:05:12 +0000

The call for presentations for FOSS4G 2013 is now closed – but voting on the proposals submitted has opened, at http://community-review.foss4g.org/. There are full instructions on the voting page, which will close on Monday 22nd April. Now’s it’s time for you to help shape the programme for one of maptember’s biggest events…

Press Release 10th April 2013

Jo — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 10:29:03 +0000

The Community goes to the Polls!

The planning for the FOSS4G conference reaches a significant milestone with the closing of the Call for Presentations (12th April). Now the open source user community has the opportunity to review the abstracts submitted and vote for those that they want to hear at the conference. It’s perhaps not surprising that a conference focused on Open Source has developed a tradition of engaging with delegates, and this year will be no exception.
Full details of the process will be available on the FOSS4G website (http://2013.foss4g.org) once the Call for Papers closes and the voting portal opens, but in essence the method will be the same as in previous years. Then respondents saw all the proposals, in a personal random order (that is, each person gets their own order; important to prevent any bias as a result of user fatigue!). They can score as many or as few as they like between 0 and 2, with 0 being the default “I don’t care”, 1 being “some interest” and 2 being “very interested”. This allows folks to just troll down the list and pick off items of interest removing the need to carefully rank the entire set. Once the votes are received, the Local Organising Committee then has the task of creating the final programme from the selected presentations. This will be completed at a meeting in late April, after which the draft programme is published. Community voting is open for two weeks and is accessible to anyone (you don’t even need to have registered yet!). So if you want to make sure that the conference has in it what you want to hear about, you’d better get voting!

Notes to the Editor:

Media Sponsorship: FOSS4G would welcome the support and encouragement of media sponsors. Full details are available at http://2013.foss4g.org/media-sponsorship-package/.

Logo: The FOSS4G logo can be downloaded from: http://2013.foss4g.org/Style/.

Press Release 25th March 2013

Jo — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 10:07:26 +0000

Key Deadlines are approaching for FOSS4G’13

It might feel like a long way off, but Maptember (the month formerly known as September: www.maptember.org) is fast approaching, and the key dates for ensuring your participation are perhaps nearer than you might think. As a community led event, the content for FOSS4G is driven by user submissions, which is then reviewed and voted on by the community! A truly democratic process that ensures that the programme reflects the latest developments, trends and issues affecting the OSGeo Community in 2013. The final programme is then shaped and moulded by the Local Organising Committee and published in May – early enough to whet the appetite of anyone holding back on making their final travel arrangements! In order for all this to happen in good time for September, sorry, Maptember, deadlines for submissions are:

for Workshops: 31st March
for Presentations: 12th April, and
for Maps: May 31st (details to be announced!)

Also of note is the end of the Early Bird Registration: 31st May

Press Release 11th March 2013

Jo — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 10:03:21 +0000

FOSS4G keynote speakers are announced

The Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference, the premier international conference focused on open source geospatial software, is fast approaching. The conference will be taking place in Nottingham, UK from 17th – 21st September 2013). It is therefore with great pleasure that OSGeo is able to announce four world renowned speakers from the open source community as keynote presenters.
Paul Ramsey co-founded the geospatial software company PostGIS in 2001 and has continued to support the open source geospatial community with his work in government and industry, winning the Sol Katz Award in 2008. Kate Chapman, based in Jakarta, Indonesia, is the Acting Executive Director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), a non-governmental organization dedicated to helping support communities, governments and humanitarian responders in their utilization of the free and crowd-sourced map OpenStreetMap for crisis response and contingency planning.

They will be joined by Ian James the Chief Architect at Ordnance Survey responsible for the overall systems architecture. His 20 years’ of working in information systems has enabled him to work on a wide variety of Geospatial production systems, but more recently as the Technical Architect for the UK Location Programme. Finally we will hear from Edward Anderson (Open Development Technology Alliance at the World Bank) who coordinates the World Bank’s ICT Knowledge platform’s programme to use digital engagement tools for building greater public transparency and civic participation, as well as more accountability around public services. His varied carrier from aerospace engineer has led him to working and building new technical communities between NASA, Google, Random Hacks of Kindness, and CrisisCommons amongst others.

Further information on the speakers is available at: 2013.foss4g.org/programme/keynoters/

Each of these speakers will be bringing with them a wealth of knowledge of working with open source tools and data in a wide variety of application areas that will act to set the tone of the entire conference. As thought leaders in their respective fields, expect to be challenged in how Open Source software and data is being used, and can be used in the future, to change the world to a better place.

The theme for FOSS4G’13 is “Geo for All” which reflects an aim to encourage attendance from anyone considering using open source and geospatial software for the first time. The numerous current initiatives propelling Open Data have highlighted to an even wider audience the benefits of using geospatial data to gain additional insights into their data, Add the current economic climate, and the interest in open source geospatial solutions grow ever stronger. These speakers provide an excellent opportunity to provide insight into the rising prominence of Open Source software and data.

About FOSS4G (2013.foss4g.org): FOSS4G is the global conference for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial, hosted by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and organised by a Local Organising Committee. FOSS4G will be held in in the United Kingdom for the first time in 2013, at the East Midlands Conference Centre (www.nottinghamconferences.co.uk/emcc/) in Nottingham, from 17th to 21st September. FOSS4G 2013 will follow on from the Association for Geospatial Information (www.agi.org.uk) annual GeoCommunity event held in the same venue. These two conferences form a part of the geospatial focused events happening across the UK in September (www.maptember.org).

Media Sponsorship: FOSS4G would welcome the support and encouragement of media sponsors. Full details are available at 2013.foss4g.org/media-sponsorship-package/

Call for Presentations ends 12th April

Antony — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 08:54:25 +0000

Just another couple of days now to get your presentation proposal in for FOSS4G 2013 in Nottingham – there are plenty (250+) of slots to fill, and all the details are here. The call will close at the end of Friday 12th April, so get in early if you can to avoid the last minute rush.

Once the deadline has passed, the Community Voting period will start on Monday April 13th (the link will be added to the page when it’s ready to roll), to allow anyone to vote for the presentations they want to see at the conference. This will take place over a period of two weeks, before the Local Organising Comittee meets in Nottingham on 24th and 25th April to put together the full programme.

Deadlines ahead

Antony — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 09:39:06 +0000

Just a couple of days left to submit a proposal for a workshop for FOSS4G 2013: the deadline is the end of March. Remember that workshops are not just about hands-on technical stuff – one of the key aims for this conference is to bring new participants into the FOSS4G world, so there is scope for sessions on, for example, the open source development landscape, or documentation, or testing and evaluating tools.

The deadline for proposals for presentations is just a couple of weeks off, on 12th April. After that we move into selection mode, with community voting on proposals taking place in the period between the deadline and the final selection process by the Local Organising Committee on 24th and 25th April.

In the meantime, look out for news of another major sponsor soon, and keep an eye on the Maptember web site for the ever-growing list of events which will make the UK the mappiest place to be for four glorious weeks…

Maptember is happening…

Antony — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 10:08:23 +0000

As the countdown to FOSS4G 2013 moves inexorably towards the magic 6 months mark, we are starting to see the shape of the conference slowly form before our eyes….

Most of the keynote speakers have now been announced, and we’re delighted with the range of experience and perspectives of those who have agreed to help set the tone
The Academic Track submissions period is now closed, and the process of selecting papers for publication and presentation is underway
Proposals for workshops can still be submitted until the end of March, with another two weeks beyond this (until 12th April to be precise) for proposals for presentations – we’ve had a number of good proposals already, but we are keen to maximise opportunities for hands-on learning and sharing, so don’t hold back if you’ve got an idea!
Early bird registration runs until 31st May, but some accommodation types are limited, so get in early if you want the best choice

In the meantime, we’ve busy working on facilities, entertainment options, the hackathon on 16th Sept, and attracting more sponsors (we’re pretty happy with those who’ve signed up so far). And remember, September has officially been designated Maptember in the UK with a whole host of great events, so book out the month now (assuming you haven’t already).

Hackathon Registration is now open!

Jo — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 15:48:02 +0000

Are you in Nottingham around the 16th and 17th of September this year? Do you fancy some hacking on the theme of “Geo For All”? Whether you’re coming to FOSS4G or not (of course we’d rather that you were), then you should sign up for our free Hackathon at eventbrite. The aim is simple- build tools that help with humanitarian projects worldwide.

So come along, meet fellow hackers, have a great time, and potentially do something really worthwhile!