After 6 months or so of collaboration FOSS4G UK 2018 finally happened! I was a small part of the dedicated team who brought the conference together and it was an amazing experience. Thanks to James (@JamesLMilner), Tom (@tomchadwin), Isabel (@IsaUlitzsch), Sam (@SamRFranklin), Max (@GeospatialMax) and Dennis (@goldrydigital) as well as Jo Cook and Steve Feldman who gave us occasional nudges in the right direction with their experience from FOSS4GUK 2016 Southampton. Organising the conference felt a bit like organising a wedding(!) in that once we had picked the date, location, catering and sorted out the guest list, the rest more-or-less fell into place! Not that I intend to do either again in the near future!
Unfortunately I wasn’t around for the team photo on Friday, but I was there in spirit!
The conference itself went amazingly well and it was great to see so many people there who were so enthusiastic about open source geospatial software. Unfortunately I was only able to attend Thursday, but I managed to take part in some great workshops on pgRouting and Satellite Data, learn some new things, make some new contacts and baby sit the room-to-room live feed!
MacGyver putting in an appearance at FOSS4GUK 2018 in Mathilde Ørstavik’s Keynote talk on Extracting intelligent information from aerial images using machine learning.
It was a struggle to work out which stream to attend and I’ve seen from Twitter (#FOSS4GUK) that Tom Armitage went to town with the ‘May the FOSS be with you’ Star Wars theme, the highlight being a presentation using a light sabre rather than a laser pointer:
@MapNav_Tom knows his audience Lightsaber maps in #qgis #FOSS4GUK pic.twitter.com/aC272OVbf7
— ED PARSONS (@edparsons) March 9, 2018
"It's not as clumsy or random as a laser, an elegant pointer for a more civilised age." #FOSS4GUK https://t.co/ygPHjmuWtC
— Tom Armitage (@MapNav_Tom) March 9, 2018
I still hope to have a run through of Tom’s workshop material when I get some time 🙂
Everyone hard at work in the pgRouting, PostGIS and QGIS workshop.
We will post links to all the slides and material we can on the website – if yours are not there yet, send them over or submit a PR. I do hope we can do this again, and if people would like to volunteer for the next conference, please make yourself known!
If you’d like a chat about potential for OS Geo training for individuals or groups, please do send me an email nick@nickbearman.me.uk or give me a call on 07717745715.