FOSS4G 2013 » Press Releases

Press Release 9th August 2013

Jo — Wed, 07 Aug 2013 08:53:21 +0000

Get Fit for Maptember

September 2013, in the UK at least, is Maptember! The sheer volume of geospatial conferences and events has led to the month having to be renamed, with a dedicated website being set-up to guide delegates through the myriad of options open to them.

For the first time ever the global Open Source caravan, FOSS4G, comes to the UK. Co-located with the huge annual UK GI gathering, the AGI GeoCommunity, these two events will turn Nottingham University campus into the focus of the geospatial world. Also, for the first time since its inauguration event, State of the Map will return to the UK being hosted in Birmingham.

In addition the Society of Cartographers, British Cartographic Society and the Remote Sensing and Photogrammetry Society all hold their annual conferences in Maptember, with workshops and Hacks for OpenStreetMap and QGIS aplenty.

As we all know, Geospatial Conferences are intense affairs and with this focus of activity in a single month we’re advising delegates to prepare for the onslaught with an appropriate training programme. A phased introduction of sleep deprivation, wifi-signal hunting, finger-strengthening exercises are recommended, with additional focus on #geobeer intake enlargement. On a more serious note, how about getting your social media presence ready? Make sure you are using the right #hashtags, connecting with the relevant groups, your profiles are up to date and start networking ahead of the event…or just have business cards at the ready. And don’t forget packing all the electronics – phone chargers (and plug adaptors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BS_1363).

Booking for FOSS4G remains open until 9^th September.

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 29th July 2013

Jo — Tue, 30 Jul 2013 09:46:02 +0000

Five New Key Note Presenters Announced!

It is with great pleasure that FOSS4G’13 Local Organising Committee (LOC) is able to announce an additional five keynote speakers to the September (or should that be Maptember?) conference programme.

Chris Tucker is the creator of MapStory which is a new take on the global data commons designed to empower user communities to self-organise. Chris might be more widely known as the former CEO and President of ERDAS and the founding CSO of In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s Venture Fund.

Ben Hennig (University of Sheffield) is one of the leading lights of the WorldMapper.org project, which is working on mapping the social dimensions of the world. He is continuing his work at the University of Oxford on understanding social inequalities, humanity’s impact on Earth, global sustainability and new concepts for the visualisation of these issues: which can all be seen at www.viewsoftheworld.net

Emer Coleman (Technology Strategy Board) is a familiar face to anyone working with Open Data within the UK, as she is one of the principal shapers of UK policy through her involvement in the London Data Store and as Deputy Director for Digital Engagement in the Government Digital Service (Cabinet Office). Emer has presented on her work globally including at Code for America Summit 2012 in San Francisco.

Jason Davies is the co-author of D3.js, the popular open-source visualisation library, as well implementing the largest number of map projections you’re ever likely to need!

Jason is joined finally by Nathan Woodrow from Australia, one of the principal contributing developers to QGIS. With the anticipated launch of the latest version of QGIS anticipated in the very near future, we’re expecting people to be hanging on Nathan’s every word!

Ben Hennig, Chris Tucker, Emer Coleman, Jason Davies and Nathan Woodrow.

These speakers will join the list of world renowned speakers already confirmed from the open source community: Paul Ramsey (PostGIS co-founder), Kate Chapman (Executive Director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team), Ian James (Chief Architect at Ordnance Survey) and Edward Anderson (Open Development Technology Alliance at the World Bank).

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 June 2013

Jo — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 13:17:54 +0000

FOSS4G puts out a call for GeoHackers and Mappers

There is an incredible amount happening not just within the FOSS4G programme; which itself is spanning nine steams over three days and five days of workshops; but ‘around’ FOSS4G as well. The Local Organising Committee (LOC) are particularly pleased to be able announce the GeoHack: funded by the UK Met Office, the aim of the hack is too tackle truly global environmental and humanitarian issues with the use of the OSGeo/Open Source stack (in particular the OS Geo Live 7.0 DVD) and OpenData including Met Office DataPoint and Ordnance Survey Open Data as well as others.

We are putting the shout out to software and hardware hackers, graphic designers, innovative thinkers, story tellers, translators, well anyone really who would like to contribute. GeoHack runs 17th and 18th September within the ‘geo-tent’ being erected at the conference venue. It’s FREE, but spaces will be limited, so sign up early at the GeoHack page to register your interest.

If working in such an intense manner is not quite your thing, perhaps the Call for Maps is more interesting. For the first time FOSS4G will be hosting a digital gallery of cartographic output. The gallery is being curated by Dr Kenneth Field, Editor of the British Cartographic Society’s ‘The Cartographic Journal’. So if you think you’ve got something suitable to submit, then why not share your work and enter your creation into one of the prize categories?

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 29th May 2013

Jo — Thu, 30 May 2013 08:45:40 +0000

Full Programme released; Early Bird extended to 14th June 2013.

The planning for the FOSS4G conference (17th – 21st September 2013) reaches a significant milestone with the release of the full programme for the 2013 conference (http://2013.foss4g.org/timetable/). This has been an extremely difficult process to orchestrate principally because of the desire to fit in as many of the excellent submissions that were received as possible. This has meant extending the programme to 9 continuous streams covering 200 presentations. A challenge enough of logistics, but in addition to this the Local Organising Committee have secured facilities to run additional workshops in parallel with the main conference. Community Voting for these additional workshops will be under way shortly, for which as an extra thank you to the community. These additional workshops will be run in a stream alongside the presentations and will be included in the conference fee.

Not only does your ticket now have added value, but in addition to mark the release of the programme the Early Bird deadline has been extended to the 14th June (closes midnight, British Summer Time). We hope that this gives as many of you as possible the ability to take advantage of the great reduction and confirm your place at the #geohappening of the year!

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 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:

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/.

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/