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foss4gna

FOSS4GNA 2019 Call for Papers now open

rjhale · Nov 13, 2018 ·

The call for papers is open on FOSS4GNA 2019. The conference will be April 16-18 2019 at the Marina Village Conference Center in San Diego California.

Am I going to submit? I think so. I did some work with a 911 locally in TN and I think it’s worth talking about just because of the hoops we had to jump through to make everyone happy on the ESRI side of the house.So more than likely I will fall under policy and planning.

So – check it out. The official website is http://2019.foss4g-na.org/. If you’ve never been to a FOSS4G meeting you should give it a go. You get a massive amount of technical with people that want to talk to you. You meet developers and discuss the ups and downs of life and software.

I’ll see you there.


FOSS4G-NA 2019

rjhale · Oct 10, 2018 ·

FOSS4G-NA popped up on my radar this week.

So from just the website and a few twitter noise makers it looks like It’s headed to Mission Beach California (San Diego) April 16-18 2019.  I’ve made the last 3 – so It looks like I’m going to do my best to make this one.  Road Trip? I encourage you to attend and support the FOSS4G North America Community.

FOSS4GNA 2018

rjhale · May 24, 2018 ·

I love a good road trip. FOSS4GNA was in St Louis Missouri this year. Close enough for me to get in the car and tune out for 5 to 6 hours.

First thing on the Agenda – QGIS.  I did the 4 hour “Intro to QGIS” for about 60 something people. You had people who had worked around gis for a good while and were curious about this Open Source desktop. You had some people who had been using it and had questions. Overall it was a bit much with that many people – but worth the effort. I hope everyone walked out with something new they didn’t know. I was inspired – 4 years ago you’d scream “QGIS” and there were a few who knew. I think this year I’ve taught the 4 hour class to about 100 people. This is going well – watch for QGIS Part II coming shortly. I’m hopeful to do the 8 hour one at some point. Seriously – I know you people love 3.5 hours of me talking but the 8 hours of me talking is magnificent (it’s actually not).

I did a really technical “Copy and paste” of the paper abstracts as listed on the website and filtered out a few words that were throwing everything off.  You could pick and poke and over analyze this very happy looking word cloud a bunch – I wouldn’t. Do notice the giant work “DATA” in the middle of it though. There is a very small word: GIS. So I’ve gotten the question several times over the last bit “Why go to this one?”. My consulting life has taken a very data centric turn and to deal with that data I use open source tools. So I spend a lot of time talking to people at the conference. I spend time talking to the developers who make the software I like…at this conference. This one scratches an itch for me. There are a lot of smart people. It’s a good thing. if I go to an event and have all the answers what’s the point in going. So what I walked out with is this following:

  • I never heard “Big Data” – it was just data. The implication was there for it to be big. Hence you hear a lot of Machine Learning. I have only used machine learning in terrible Terminator Jokes and being snarky. It’s time to give it a look. It’s also time for all this machine learning to do a proper reboot of the Terminator franchise..
  • Python is my nemesis. I need to spend more time with it. If I heard that one word once I heard it half a dozen times. Which – no big deal it’s a tech conference but for me it stuck out more than usual. Maybe I’m more self conscience about it these days. If I count every programming thing I’ve ever done that has stuck – so far it’s been bash shell scripting from 26 years ago (that’s not even programming so much). I’ve just got to force myself into more cases where I have to use python.
  • All this machine learning is turning it’s collective head towards imagery. In a conference where I don’t hear a ton of “Raster” or just ignore it – suddenly raster was in my face everywhere.
  • Geopackage    – I feel like I’ve spent over a year going “PLEASE DON’T LET ME BE WRONG ABOUT GEOPACKAGE”. After this conference – I found it mentioned multiple times and the over arching theme seemed to be “it’s a thing now so deal with it”. With QGIS switching to geopackage as the default data format – I expect this grow over the rest of 2018.
  • I found myself walking in and out of conversations constantly. Sometimes I meant to stick my head in – sometimes the conversation found me. I missed several talks just for the fun of talking to other users/developers.
  • The nice thing with this open source software – there are smart people working on it. So what happens when you need improvements to the software? GDAL Barn Raising.   How much hay did they raise? 140k worth. So there are much needed improvements coming to gdal. It’s noteworthy looking at the companies that contributed. Yes ESRI is in there. So if you ever wondered – they see the value of the improvements. Open source GIS touches a lot of software.

Other noteworthy things:

  • Someone said “there’s a line at the women’s restroom”. If you stopped and took a look around – there were more women at this conference. I don’t have a number. There were more. There were about 527 total humans registered at the conference. I will guess higher than 35% for women. No numbers to back me up so deal with it.
  • The second thing I do is go look at a mirror and walk out and look at the crowd. I’m tired of seeing white middle aged balding bearded glasses wearing people at conferences. There were people of color at this conference. The colors varied. Not everyone was like me and that was a good thing.

If there was a keynote that stuck out – it was the final one.

To be clear, @opencholmes just gave the most consequential #geospatial tech talk of the decade @foss4gna. #FOSS4GNA @planetlabs @opengeospatial pic.twitter.com/bmKZrl2hWi

— Christopher Tucker (@PLANETucker) May 16, 2018

Chris Holmes brought the conference to an end with a discussion…of….well….Deep Learning…Machine learning….imagery……..the idea of a queryable earth.  In other words there’s enough imagery being taken you should be able to “ask” it questions. Planet Labs it pulling down something like 10 terrabytes of imagery a day. One snapshot of the earth. A DAY. So train the computers to classify the imagery and start asking questions.

There was a lot more that happened. Walking across St Louis at night. Food. City Park. Talking to total strangers. Meeting random people I bump into over the interwebs and hassling them. I stuck my foot in the Mississippi River. I got to play Geohipster for a day and tweet random insanity.  Having served on multiple conference committees – I find I’m happier not on them.  This was a good event. I enjoyed it. I walked away feeling overwhelmed and hopeful for the path I’m barely scratching after 26 years. So where is FOSS4GNA in 2019? Stay Tuned.

Holy crap its @brymcbride @bitnerd @TernerGeo #FOSS4GNA pic.twitter.com/7FUWwmju1f

— Randal Hale (@rjhale) May 15, 2018

FOSS4GNA 2018 – May 14-16 2018

rjhale · Oct 27, 2017 ·

FOSS4GNA is happening May 14-16 2018 in St Louis Missouri. Speaking of – I’ve only accidentally driven in to Missouri once so this should be fun.

They also put out the call for Papers and I won’t bore you with a rehash of what papers they are looking for – I will only bore you with the dates:

  • October 13, 2017: Submissions open
  • January 15, 2018: Workshop submission deadline
  • January 16 – 22, 2018: Community review for workshops
  • January 26, 2018: Workshops announced
  • February 8, 2018: Talk submission deadline
  • February 9 – 20, 2018: Community review for talks
  • February 28, 2018: Talks announced

Why the dates? Because that’s the one thing I’ll forget but I’ll see this post until I make about 6 more and it will force me to submit something.

If you haven’t been to one of these things I’ll make my case here – you need to go.

  1. It’s not a sales conference. You get a chance to talk to people – not talked at by people. demos tend to go horribly wrong which is awesome. Developers are also users so they have to eat what they make.
  2. You get a chance to talk to the developers and users about anything. It’s not one ecosystem of products. It’s everything from LIDAR to Desktop GIS to Server side things.
  3. Even if you are an ESRI only shop – there is something here for you. I will even hazard a bet you’ll walk away going “I think we could use <insert idea here>……” and you might change your life.
  4. You aren’t a customer – your part of a community.
  5. It’s a nice change of pace. Interactions are pleasant. People are fun. A good time is had by all.

So show up. Toss this into your budget and go – you’ll learn something I swear.

FOSS4GNA 2016 – First Post

rjhale · May 8, 2016 ·

It’s over.

As one friend pointed out there are something like 4 stages of conference attendance:

  1. Go for the Tech
  2. Go for the Friends
  3. Go for Free Beer
  4. You Stop Going

On most everything I’m at 4. It takes a lot to drag me to a conference these days. I think my most attended conference is the Georgia URISA Conference. I’ve made three FOSS4G Conferences. For FOSS4G events I’m still at a 1 and 2.

There’s going to be several blog posts over the next few days on the conference. I can’t cram all my thoughts into one post. Plus my posts have been getting longer and longer and I really want to shorten them up a bit.

I’ve made the conferences in 2013, 2015, and 2016. Each one gets a little bit bigger…..BUT – each one has the same community feel I’ve missed elsewhere and enjoy. It really doesn’t matter who is the super star rolling into this conference – you’re going to have the same good group of people finely arrayed from business casual to “Well Day 3 for these Cargo pants”. You have people who really get don’t enjoy crowds and then you have the people who can command a room full of people. This conference accepts all kinds and it’s nice. It’s refreshing. It’s the way GIS should be.

We were somewhere around 550 strong for FOSS4GNA – which if you noticed there was also the ESRI SERUG or whatever conference running at the same time during this event. Overall – didn’t hurt us a bit. In fact – ESRI – please plan competing ones from here on out. It actually may have helped.

If you haven’t been to a FOSS4G Event you should go. This is coming from a guy who is at a 4 for everything. You will meet friends, you’ll learn something, you will walk away refreshed (and a little tired).

Like I said – more posts coming shortly. This was my get up and “stretch and warm up” post for the rest of this week.

Just in case you’re debating going to something:

foss4g-logo

BOSTON

 

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