Events

The fine folks at Crunchy Data have lined up a great set of talks for a one-day conference celebrating this year’s PostGIS day on 17 November. It’s an online event, with sessions scheduled for over twelve hours; wherever you in the world and whenever you’re awake that day, you can drop in at any time. The event is free and registration is now open.

FOSSGIS is the major German-speaking community event for geospatial open-source software and OpenStreetMap, a smaller, local, German-speaking FOSS4G. It is held annually and usually attracts several hundred people to share and discuss the latest trends and advancements around software, open data and case studies.

FOSSGIS 2023 logo showing the stylised Fernsehturm and a outline of Berlin's administrative boundary.

FOSS4G 2023 will be held from 15 to 18 March 2023 in Berlin. The call for participation is now open until 7 November 2022. As usual, there will be a mix of general and academic talks, lightning talks, workshops and project demos.

Speaking of local FOSS4G events: FOSS4G:UK is scheduled for PostGIS Day, 17 November. There won’t be a single location, instead FOSS4G:UK takes place simultaneously at 10 locations across the UK.

The event is free to attend for anyone interested — organisers ask you to donate £20 to OSGeo:UK, MapAction or another charity.

In addition to local schedules, keynotes and selected sessions will be streamed to all locations, and sessions will be streamed online if you can’t attend in person.

The Guardian is hosting an interactive workshop exploring the evolution of Cartography.

[Y]ou will discover how maps, and our relationship to them, have evolved over time. You will learn how the way that a map is designed can influence the way in which it is interpreted, and why this means that even the most authoritative map may not be as objective as we think.

You will also draw on your new understanding of cartography to create your own geographic data, and will touch on how to successfully display geographic data to tell a story, and how geo data visualisation has evolved and influenced modern-day map techniques.

The event is taking place on 26 October, from 5pm to 8pm (BST), and is led by Jess Baker and Paul Naylor, both work at Ordnance Survey. It’s an online event, so you can dial in from anywhere in the world.

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team has teamed up with local organising partners to host community events in several locations around the world.

Instead of hosting a single event, this year we are investing our time and resources in supporting global, regional, and local conferences and community events around the world to bring the spirit of the Summit to thousands of new people.

I love this idea. Instead of flying-in people to one big event hosted in Europe or Northern America, surely excluding many people from attending because of travel costs and visa requirements, HOT brings the event closer to the community and the people who benefit from their work.

Twelve events are currently planned until the end of 2022:

  • 19 August: State of the Map – Florence, Italy
  • 20 August: Ensemble pour la cartographie participative – Butembo, DRC
  • 22 August: FOSS4G – Florence Italy
  • 19 September : National Meeting of Geography Students (ENEG) – Guanajuato, Mexico
  • 24 October: GeONG – Chambery, France
  • 30 October: Popular & Collaborative Disaster Risk Management and OpenStreetMap – Lima, Peru
  • 31 October: Teto Brasil annual gathering + Cidade em Foco (City in Focus) – São Paulo, Brazil
  • 11 November: Conference Internationale sur la digitalisation des Territoires (CIDT) – Bamako, Mali
  • 14 November: Pista ng Mapa – Cebu City, Philippines
  • 24 November: CAFDO3 – Tunis, Tunisia
  • 28 November: Pacific Geospatial Conference – Suva, Fiji
  • Date tbc: Kombi Kartografi / SotM Haiti – Port-au-Prince, Haiti

SatSummit is back this year after a four-year break, bringing together experts from the satellite industry, global development, environmental protection, and governments to discuss how satellite data can contribute to addressing the planet’s most pressing issues. It’s scheduled for 28 and 29 September 2022 at Convene in Washington, D.C.

The conference schedule is still in the making, but tickets are on sale now.

OpenStreetMap US has recently uploaded recordings from State of the Map 2015 to their Youtube channel. Throwbacks like these are a window into the topics that moved the community back then. How do they compare to today’s?

This year’s FOSS4G in Florence, Italy, hasn’t even happened yet, but planning is already underway for the next edition. FOSS4G 2023 will take place in Prizren, Kosovo. After Florence, that’s an event in Europe two years in a row, deviating from the usual rota: Europe, Americas, rest of the world.

FOSS4G is the world’s largest meeting focusing on open-source geospatial software and open data bringing together developers, users and academics from around the world. It is organised by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation and a local group.

Further details for the 2023 event, such as a date, have not yet been announced.

Pacific Geospatial Conference is a new super conference combining three previously separate ones:

  • Pacific Geospatial Remote Sensing Council’s Pacific GIS&RS User Conference,
  • OSGeo Oceania’s FOSS4G SotM Oceania Conference, and
  • Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team’s HOT Summit.

Bringing together remote-sensing and GIS practitioners, open-source enthusiasts, and the OpenStreetMap community, this gathering should make for a varied range of talks.

The conference will be hosted at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji and feature talks and workshops, a women’s session and a poster competition. Registration is set to open on 1 August; abstracts are due by 31 August, although submission has yet to open.

Update: The call for presentations is now open. Submit either an abstract for a 15-minute presentation or a five-minute lightning talk via the online form.