This year’s FOSSGIS Conference 2022 came to an end on March 12. Due to the pandemic, the conference was held purely virtually and did not take place in Marburg as originally planned. Nevertheless, the organizers of FOSSGIS e.V. were able to count almost 700 tickets for a total of 111 contributions and 25 workshops with over 250 participants. This now second purely virtual conference still offered many opportunities to network with the participants away from the contributions. First and foremost, the network world, the evening event “Network World Dialogues”, the very lively chat and the virtual stands of the exhibitors should be mentioned.
As in every year, terrestris employees offered many contributions and workshops this year or were available as co-speakers. A tradition that was already cherished before the pandemic: the video team of c3voc has again done an outstanding job and made all contributions available as video, which you can now also watch after the conference. A list of our contributions, in which the videos are also linked, can be found here. All contributions were recorded and all recordings will be available shortly via the Media-CCC platform, in addition these can also be found on YouTube and in the TIB-AV Portal.
The program of FOSSGIS and the quality of the presentations was very high, and since you didn’t have to physically change rooms, there was a lot of time left for questions from the virtual plenum. So definitely watch the videos to the end afterwards. After two excellent keynotes on OpenData and OpenSource Software (i.e. the two core topics of FOSSGIS) had sworn the audience to the most central aspects of the conference, it was then difficult for one or the other to decide on one of the parallel lectures. Some listened to the sound of one lecture, while the slides of another talk were viewed on the second home monitor.
The conference concluded with a panel discussion on “Open Source GIS and Open Data in the field of tension between cloud, data protection and digital sovereignty”. After an introduction including a statement on the title of the event, the participants were able to ask questions to the five panellists, including our employee Arnulf Christl. An interesting discussion ensued about possible future challenges that our industry will have to face. This gave this year’s conference a stylish conclusion, which almost made you forget that it was a purely virtual event.
In the closing event, the president of FOSSGIS e.V., Jörg Thomsen, announced that a framework agreement on cooperation between FOSSGIS e.V. and BKG had been concluded. Both sides hope for synergy effects and a fruitful collaboration on various levels.
We thank the visitors, speakers, workshop leaders, session moderators, sponsors, helpers, organizers and the entire FOSSGIS e.V. for this thoroughly successful and varied FOSSGIS. For the following events, we would like to see — as this time — a very broad range of topics in lectures and workshops, but also more diversity among the speakers. If you have any ideas, you are cordially invited to get involved in the organization for 2023: Dare to and contact the people of FOSSGIS!
After FOSSGIS is before FOSSGIS: The conference will take place in Berlin for the third time in 2023 — after 2007 and 2014 — this time hosted by the geographical institute of the Humboldt University there. This next FOSSGIS conference will hopefully take place again in presence and on site. However, should the circumstances not allow this contrary to our hope, we know that FOSSGIS is an absolute must, even virtually.
Below are some impressions of the conference.
