It’s been some days and FOSS4G storm is calming down. This year I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy a great Maptember experience attending first The State of The Map, then a week for holidays enjoying Great Britain rains, castles and people and finally spend a whole week in Mappingham with all the geofolks.
Regarding the OSM conference, well I’m more an advocate and a casual mapper than an active OSM guy, anyway I enjoyed the conference with lots of good talks with new and old friends and learn a trick or two. The big twohits on this conference were in my opinion about the role of women on the OSM community and the importance of accessibility information on the map, so people with different disabilities can get an useful representation for their needs. Both points make me think OSM community and projects are mature, and raising new necessities far more evolved that just have a nice rendered map of our cities and roads.
And then the FOSS4G conference. When I registered, here at the office we concluded that for this year it would be more productive for me to just attend and do networking (well and some beers) instead of working on talks and slides as I did in Denver. So I thought it would be a relaxed conference and even decided to volunteer as a way to meet more people and help the organization team. Then in August someone convinced me to apply for the OSGeo Board elections and crazily I was elected. So I found myself attending the conference as a volunteer and fresh member of the OSGeo Board of Directors. Personally it’s been a great experience, tiring but also rewarding and this is just the start of a lot of work I hope to do for the foundation.
The conference was amazingly well organized. The team was restless, and from the outside the coordination was perfect. The sessions run smoothly (maybe some sessions got more attendants than expected), the parties were funny and entertaining and the venue well distributed and organised (the walk to the second building was a good stretch our legs).
I won’t talk about technical highlights, there are lots of good reviews and after thoughts, i.e. Paul Ramsey, Steven Feldman, Jo Cook, Attle Frenvik, etc. If you are looking for resources you will find many many great photos at the FOSS4G Flickr group, an archive of tweets at Eventifier, and most of the slides and materials from workshops will be available at the ELOGeo repository. I highly recommend to take a look on the Map Contest gallery, there are really good works on static and web maps.
I’m looking forward to see some of the most commented talks that for one reason or another I couldn’t attend. As with previous FOSS4G conferences, the amount of materials, websites and slides to review is overwhelming. I don’t know if I will be able to attend FOSS4G 2014 in Portland, Oregon, but for sure, and at least, I’ll do my best to go the new FOSS4G Europe, next summer in Bremen, Germany.
Credits to Addy and Barry for the pothos on the Flickr group, mine are too bad to be used here 🙂
