FOSS4G13 – 3 days of peace love and maps

From the 18th to 21st September Phil James and I attended FOSS4G 2013 (Free and Open Source Software 4 Geospatial) in Nottingham. The conference kick started on the Wednesday evening with an Ice-breaker event featuring a pub-quiz following by a light-hearted talk given by Mike Parker, the author of Map Addict. The talk was very enjoyable but the quiz proved somewhat challenging and my sole contribution to my team’s effort being that I knew which animal Friar Tuck is in the Disney Robin Hood. He’s a badger.

 

P9180726 by barryandjo, on Flickr
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License  by  barryandjo  – Mike Parker’s Talk

 

The conference then truly came to life over the next two days with some great keynote talks. Particular highlights being Chris Tucker from MapStory.org, Tim Sutton from QGIS and Paul Ramsey from POSTGIS who’s sermon on being an open source citizen was one of the best talks I’ve ever been to. These were interspersed with a great selection of talks (some of which are available here ) showing the uses of software as well as outlining releases of new software such as the OpenLayers 3 which looks very exciting.

P9210739 by barryandjo, on Flickr
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License  by  barryandjo  Paul Ramsey’s Keynote

 

The conference was also complimented brilliantly with some great evening events featuring comedy, music and drinks. I would like to thank Steven Feldman and all of the FOSS4G heroes for putting on what was a thoroughly enjoyable event

 

Author: Neil

Software Engineer/ Research Assistant Urban Observatory

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