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:
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.
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/.
