We were all eagerly anticipating this year’s FOSSGIS conference, hoping to finally meet customers, friends, or colleagues again in person after the many days dominated by the pandemic. But unfortunately, the virus is throwing a wrench in our plans here as well. Like so many events in these times, FOSSGIS 2021 will not take place in Rapperswil, Switzerland for the second time after 2013, but online from home, although Rapperswil remains the official venue. A propos Rapperswil: We have very positive memories of exactly this conference, as the idea was born at that FOSSGIS conference in 2013 in a small circle of FOSSGIS activists that FOSSGIS could apply to host the FOSS4G 2016. As is well known, that’s how the story went.

Nevertheless, FOSSGIS 2021 will not be cancelled, but will be held as an online event. And we will again be represented at this year’s FOSSGIS conference with a large number of presentations and workshops. Our plan is to provide a somewhat deeper insight into one of our lectures or workshops every month until the conference, in a way we want to evoke the anticipation that is denied by the relocation to the Internet! We start now in April with an overview of all the lectures and events that come from our company:

Lectures:

• “OpenLayers Feature Frenzy — Great things OpenLayers can do that too few people know about”, Marc Jansen & Andreas Hocevar (Stage 1, 07.06. 11:30-12:00)
• “Agile Development, Open Source and Official Data”: Arnulf Christl (Stage 1, 07.06. 16:00-16:30)
• “3D Geo Applications with CesiumJS – Data, Applications and Specifications”: Michael Holthausen (Stage 1, 08.06. 16:00-16:30)
• “SmartMapping: Official Data as VectorTiles”: Arnulf Christl (Stage 2, 09.06. 11:00-11:30)
• “SHOGun as the basis for flexible WebGIS solutions — Or: Neither “off-the-shelf” nor “fully handcrafted””: Marc Jansen (Stage 1, 09.06. 10:00-10:30)
• “The road to the modern base map – potentials and challenges of cartography and data basis”: Hannes Blitza & Christian Fremd (Stage 3, 09.06. 14:00-14:30)

Workshops:

• “GeoStyler – A UI for all* styles”: Jan Suleiman, Daniel Koch & Christian Mayer (Workshop 3, 07.06. 11:00-12:30)
• “Introduction to GeoServer”: Daniel Koch & Hannes Blitza (Workshop 1, 07.06. 14:00-15:30)
• “MapProxy in practical use”: Hannes Blitza (Workshop 1, 07.06. 16:00-17:30)
• “react-geo – Mapping with React”: Jan Suleiman & Daniel Koch (Workshop 2, 08.06. 09:00-10:30)
• “Orchestration of a GDI via Docker”: Daniel Koch & Jan Suleiman (Workshop 1, 08.06. 16:00-17:30)
• “Geodata styling in GeoServer”: Daniel Koch & Hannes Blitza (Workshop 2, 09.06. 09:00-10:30)

Lightning Talks:

• “The cloud has eaten OpenSource”: Arnulf Christl (Stage 1, 07.06. 10:00-10:05)
• “Mass conversion of cartographic style documents with GeoStyler-CLI”: Jan Suleiman, Daniel Koch & Christian Mayer (Stage 1, 08.06. 10:00-10:05)

User meetings:

• OpenLayers User & Developer Meeting / BOF: Marc Jansen, Andreas Hocevar & Christian Mayer (BoF 2, 07.06. 16:00-17:00)

We think that, especially with the large number of workshops offered, but also through our lectures, we can present and convey a broad spectrum of the topics that we focus on in our company. We look forward to your active participation!