From August 14 – 19, 2017, the most important global conference on GIS with Free and Open Source Software took place in Boston, Massachusetts, USA: FOSS4G 2017. Last year, this took place in Bonn. Marc Jansen, the technical director of terrestris, was on site in Boston.
The dense and top-class program of this year’s main conference with up to eleven parallel tracks full of interesting topics was certainly one reason why this year’s conference with over 1100 participants was the largest FOSS4G to date. The last FOSS4G in Bonn (conference chair at the time: Till Adams, Managing Director of terrestris) already had almost 1000 participants. We believe that this renewed growth is also an indicator of the continued increasing relevance of free software for the processing, analysis and presentation of geoinformation.
More figures on this FOSS4G of superlatives? Before the conference, more than 1300 participants were trained in 56 four-hour workshops over two days.
But how do you summarize such a program? In the following, we will try to do this based on personal impressions; of course, without having been able to attend all sessions. In addition to the consistently outstanding keynotes by Paul Ramsey, Holly St. Claire, Joe Cheng, Richard Stallman and Maria Arias de Reyna, the following topics were of great importance to us: serverless, R (so many presentations at a GIS conference with a focus was a novelty for us), rather a lot of QGIS and hardly any gvSIG, rather a lot of GeoServer and only a little UMN Mapserver, 3D (some Cesium). Marc Jansen from terrestris spoke on the topic of “AnOl, GeoExt, MapStore 2, ngeo, … – An overview of extensions, plugins, libraries & frameworks around OpenLayers”.
We are already looking forward to being able to access the missed lectures online; as in previous years, the lectures were filmed and will be published on the Internet after post-processing. We will certainly point this out again.
A Visual Summary of FOSS4G 2017#foss4g #sketchnotes https://t.co/jsozoJw9Qi pic.twitter.com/nlXuKHDY26
— Experimental Craft (@artsciencelove) August 21, 2017
The Sol Katz Award, which recognizes individuals with exceptional leadership qualities in the Free and Open Source Community, was awarded to Andrea Aime (best known as one of the developers of GeoServer). A well-deserved decision. We congratulate Andrea from our partner company GeoSolutions.
Yawwwn… waking after a loooong trip back home and a good night sleep. Was it just a dream? Nope! So proud! 🙂 #osgeo #foss4g pic.twitter.com/KR5PNQyVmX
— Andrea Aime (@geowolf) August 20, 2017
Some further impressions can be gained on the flickr Seite of FOSS4G and the Google Photo Page.
After the conference, a one-day code sprint took place on the following Saturday, in which a few projects participated. Marc Jansen helped with the redesign of the OSGeo homepage and supported the OpenLayers team (this time very small with only two developers).
Great impressions from #FOSS4G code sprint! @OSGeo #contributors code sprinting at the new web site at @FOSS4G. #OSGeo pic.twitter.com/4AvsxyfPiE
— OSGeo (@OSGeo) August 19, 2017
In summary, FOSS4G was once again the best international FOSS Geo conference to be at this year. We would like to thank the organizers, sponsors, workshop leaders, speakers and participants for all contributing to its success.
The FOSS4G 2018 will take place from 28.08. – 03.09.2018 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. We at terrestris are already looking forward to actively participating there again.
