I recently returned from a week of workshops, presentations, networking, and general nerdery with an incredible group of people: open source geospatial developers, users, and other spatially-focused folk\u00a0from across the globe.<\/p>\n
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FOSS4G (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial)<\/em>, the annual conference of OSGeo<\/a>, changes locations every year \u2013 one year in Europe, one year in North America, and one year elsewhere.\u00a0 In 2013, Nottingham, England hosted the festivities<\/a>, and in 2015 will be in Seoul<\/a>. For the North American rotation in 2014, Portland<\/a> won the bid to host the conference. (You’ll see a bird on the logo<\/a>; her name is Helen.)<\/p>\n It was an incredible week, with more than 800 people from 39 countries joining us in Portland, and another 550 viewers watching talks from the livestream throughout the week. \u00a0While it’s hard to pick favorites from such a great line-up, some presentations\u00a0that struck me as notable are below. (You can access recordings\u00a0of the sessions<\/a>\u00a0on Vimeo; peruse\u00a0the Map Gallery<\/a>\u00a0to see some excellent cartography.)<\/p>\n The three keynotes were outstanding:<\/p>\n Some highlights from the general sessions:<\/p>\n To me, one of the things that made the conference so strong was a dedication to diversity — in presentation topics and a variety of activities, gatherings, and workshops –but also in\u00a0who\u00a0<\/em>was involved in the conference, and what that shared conference experience felt like for attendees. The conference organizers* made a concerted effort to make FOSS4G 2014 a welcoming space for a wide variety of people\u00a0by emphasizing (and enforcing) a Code of Conduct<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0working to increase access <\/a>to the conference.<\/p>\n A heartfelt thank you to the attendees and presenters who made this possible, and thanks, Reed, for letting me abandon my desk during the second week of classes to have an incredibly (and professionally fantastic) experience.<\/p>\n For other perspectives on the conference, see a variety<\/a> of<\/a> write-ups<\/a> from<\/a> other<\/a> attendees<\/a>; for ongoing everything involving open software for spatial work, watch #foss4g.<\/a><\/p>\n * full disclosure: in the good company of Eli Adam, Tanya Haddad, and Matt Sayler, I served as one of the co-chairs for the conference, with Darrell Fuhriman as our fearless leader (and conference chair).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I recently returned from a week of workshops, presentations, networking, and general nerdery with an incredible group of people: open source geospatial developers, users, and other spatially-focused folk\u00a0from across the globe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[71,67],"class_list":["post-2550","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mapping-geospatial","tag-conference","tag-open-source"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2550"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2550\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2699,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2550\/revisions\/2699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.reed.edu\/ed-tech\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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