Ireland/Symposium2017

OSGeo Ireland – 1st National Symposium 2017


Event Over: Thank you to everyone who took part in an fantastic day for OSGeo in Ireland

There is a set of photographs available on Flickr showing the activities from this event

Welcome to the 1st National Symposium of the OSGeo Local Chapter in Ireland - 26th May 2017

The Irish Local Chapter of OSGeo are delighted to announce the hosting of the first national Symposium in Limerick, Ireland on Friday, 26th May 2017. We, the organisers, welcome all delegates to our first meeting as an OSGeo community in Ireland. Getting started is often the hardest part. We decided to run a small single day event with the key objective of gathering people in Ireland who are associated with OSGeo tools and software or FOSS4G in general.

The schedule for the day will include the following:


 * A Morning Session of Short, Lightning Talks
 * A Keynote Presentation from Markus Neteler (GRASS-GIS Project, Mundialis, OSGeo)
 * An Afternoon Session of hands-on workshops focusing on popular OSGeo software projects, including GRASS-GIS and QGIS.

The event is open to anyone. However it will be particular interest to individuals or groups such as: those with an interest in FOSS4G, users of open source software and FOSS4G, geographers and geoscientists, computer scientists, software developers and programmers, software companies, open data users, researchers, government agencies, SMEs, NGOs, students, citizens, etc.

The symposium will provide a relaxed and stimulating environment to learn about OSGeo, meet people with similar interest in OSGeo and FOSSG, and in some cases learn some new skills in the workshops. There are lots of people using OSGeo software and tools in Ireland. This symposium will give such people a chance to officially meet as a community for the first time.

Proposed Programme


 * Lightning Talks will focus on the use of OSGeo and FOSS4G in Irish companies, government agencies, academia, etc. We are thankful to all of the individuals and organisations who accepted the offer of a lightning talk. The information about each talk will be posted here in the next update to the programme and timetable. Presentations will be made available for download after the meeting.


 * The workshops are hands on sessions where the workshop leaders will guide attendees through a 2-hour workshop on the chosen topic. Attendees should have their own laptop computer with them to participate fully in the workshop. You should have sufficient access rights to your laptop to allow you to install software onto the machine for the workshop.

What do I need to install or setup for the workshops? We are delighted to announce that all of our three workshops are practical based - so be prepared to get some practical hands on experience in these two hour sessions.

'''You will need your own laptop computer for the workshops. Unfortunately we are not in a position to provide computing facilities in the venue.'''

In terms of the practical software requirements for the workshops the following is the advice kindly provided by the workshop leaders:


 * 1) Workshop 1: GRASS-GIS - Markus will run this workshop using the OSGeo-Live USB which will be provided to all delegates in your delegate pack at registration. You will use this USB as a bootable O/S on your laptop computer. There will be a lightning talk about the OSGeo-Live USB earlier in the day
 * 2) Workshop 2: R and RPubs - Chris and Martin will run this workshop along the lines of their very highly regarded workshop series on R and related themes. This will be a practical workshop using R. You should bring your own laptop computer to the workshop. In terms of prerequisites - workshop attendees will need to install R ( https://cran.r-project.org ) and it is also highly recommended to install RStudio ( https://www.rstudio.com ). The only extra package required is called GISTools and its dependencies - this can be loaded via Tools/Install Packages on the RStudio menu,  or by typing the command install.packages(‘GISTools’,dependencies=TRUE) on the R command line
 * 3) Workshop 3: QGIS Justin and his team will also run this workshop as a practical, hands-on, workshop. Workshop attendees will need to have an up-to-date version of Q-GIS installed on their computers to take part fully in the workshop. Of course, some delegates, may prefer to use the QGIS version installed within the OSGeo-Live US. This QGIS workshop is very much an introductory session and will run through the basics of QGIS, develop some specific socio-demographic maps of Limerick (Population Change, Pobal HP Deprivation, Housing Vacancy and PPR House Price Mapping) and publish some professional final map layouts using OSM and StamenMap backgrounds. This is a short version of the usual AIRO Data for Decisions workshops. Users are expected to have some basic knowledge of GIS and thematic mapping. This course is not suitable for advanced QGIS users. The AIRO team will email all participants with the workshop data on Thursday.

Symposium Location

The symposium will be held in the Castletroy Park Hotel, which is in Limerick, Ireland.

Keynote Speaker

The Irish OSGeo Chapter are very happy to welcome Markus Neteler as our Keynote Speaker for the symposium. Markus received his MSc degree in Physical Geography and Landscape Ecology from the University of Hannover in Germany in 1999. He worked at the Institute of Geography as Research Scientist and teaching associate for two years. From 2001 to 2007, he was a researcher at FBK-irst (formerly ITC-irst), from 2005-2007 also at Centro di Ecologia Alpina. From 2008 to 2016 he was employed as head of the GIS and Remote Sensing Unit at Fondazione Edmund Mach, Trento (Italy) before joining in 2016 the company mundialis in Bonn as general manager. His main interests are remote sensing for environmental risk assessment and Free Software GIS development. He is author/co-author of two books on the Open Source Geographical Information System GRASS and various papers on applications in GIS. He is founding-member of GRASS Anwender-Vereinigung e.V. and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo.org). In September 2006, he was honoured with the Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software (GFOSS). In 2010, he obtained the the degree of a Doctor of Natural Science (Dr. rer. nat.) in Physical Geography. Since 2016 Markus lives in Bonn, Germany.

Registration Fees

We have a special registration rate for all delegates of €50. This rate includes coffee/tea breaks, lunch and access to the workshop(s) of your choice in the afternoon of the symposium. The registration costs have been kept as low as possible and the Symposium is organised on a cost-recovery basis only.

Registration is open and available here

Symposium Sponsorship

Symposium sponsors are always welcome. We can offer the sponsors the following: If you, or your organisation, is interested in providing some sponsorship to this event please contact Daniel McInerney (daniel DOT o DOT mcinerney AT gmail DOT com) or Peter Mooney (peter DOT mooney AT nuim DOT ie) and we would be happy to discuss this in more detail with you.
 * Visual presence on any programme materials produced for the symposium
 * Links and organisational logo(s) from the symposium webpage
 * Opportunity to provide promotional material for distribution to delegates in their registration pack
 * Clear acknowledgement of support during the opening and closing sessions of the symposium

More information Further details about the Irish Local Chapter of OSGeo area available on our Wiki page.

Organising Committee

We are, at the moment, a small committee. The people who have contributed most to the organisation of the symposium are as follows. All of us will be in Limerick on May 26th!


 * Peter Mooney (Maynooth University)
 * Daniel McInerney (Coillte Teoranta - Irish State Forestry Board)
 * Ozan Emem (Environmental Protection Agency)
 * Seth Girvan (Compass Informatics)
 * Richard McDonnell (The Office of Public Works)
 * Padraig Fitzmaurice (Environmental Protection Agency)
 * Hrishikesh Ballal (Geodesign Hub)

Sponsors of the 1st Irish OSGeo Symposium

We have been very lucky to have a number of very generous sponsors of this event. Without the financial support of our sponsors an event like this would not be possible. We gratefully acknowledge this support.