FOSS4G 2009: It was great
2009-10-25 22:35
The FOSS4G 2009 (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Conference) is over now, it was great. I've finally met many people that I've previously only chatted or discussed on mailing lists with.
Organisation and venue
The Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre Darling Harbour really is an amazing venue and Arinex did a great job as well. We had good food, the technicians were keeping everything up and running, even the wireless internet didn't break down and performed well.
The Organising Committee did an excellent job (especially Mark), too. I exclude myself a bit, I was more the code monkey before the conference, rather than keeping that conference running smoothly. But because of that I had the chance to visit quite a few presentations.
Presentations
Probably the most favoured presentation was Paul Ramsey's Keynote speech. It was just incredibly insightful and entertaining (watch it at YouTube). it here.
There were to other excellent presentations as well. First the Mapping interviews with open source technologies by Chris McDowall. He is using a video projector and a Wii remote control in order to map locations people are pointing at during an interview (just watch this video to get a better idea).
And second the Visualising animal movements in ‘near’ real time by Ben Madin. It was about a project where they try to track the movements if cows in Southeast Asia. The idea is to place GSM transmitters in one of the cows' stomach to track their position. But they are facing problem like "How to get a GSM signal through 40cm of meat". Really interesting.
Geodata and CouchDB
So how did my talk go? I'm very happy with it. I haven't expected so much positive feedback and so many good conversations about CouchDB and GeoCouch afterwards and during the next days.
After show parties
After the talks it's time to socialise while having a few beers. It was again great, every single night.
One outstanding event was the Ignite Spatial on Wednesday. 10 high paced talks with 20 slides displayed 15 secs each. My favourite one was the Pie charts are evil talk by Glen Bell. Another result of the night is that I'll always think about short green skirts whenever someone is mentioning Google Wave.
The code sprint
I was code sprinting OpenLayers. It was well organised and we got some cool new stuff in. Sadly, I haven't reached my goal of fixing Ticket 39, but hopefully soon (or next year in Barcelona). But I was discussing with Roald de Wit and Andreas Hocevar the implementation details of the abstraction of the UI in OpenLayers (that idea was discussed in the Openlayers BOF).
Final words
Yes, it really was great. I hope to see you all again in Barcelona at the FOSS4G 2010.