Association of American Geographers

Association of American Geographers (http://www.aag.org) (AAG)

The largest scientific and educational society for geographers. Members are primarily academics with a large portion being from government science (USGS, NASA, NOAA).

The AAG holds their "Annual Meeting" at different locations across the US. This meeting typically has between 5,000 and 10,000 attendees.

The Cyber-Infrastructure Specialty Group (CSIG) of the AAG has a Committee on Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial that sponsors paper sessions on the use of Free and Open Source Software in education and research.

Significant opportunities to encourage the use of FOSS4G in research and education exist at the AAG Annual Meeting. Many geography professors are acutely aware that commercial geospatial software has dominated GIS education in the US and are hungry for alternatives. Further, there is commonly tension between campus IT departments that manage GIS labs and instructors making it difficult to teach labs outside the preinstalled software set. Demonstrating the functionality of live disks, USB sticks and the like, catches alot of attention. Also, many graduate students own OS/X based systems and wish to be able to do research using their own systems.

In addition to an exhibition hall table, OSGeo could sponsor a paper or poster competition through the CISG FOSS4G Committee.


 * AAG 2007 Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA, April
 * AAG 2008 Annual Meeting, Boston, MA ,April 14-19th
 * AAG 2009 Annual Meeting, Las Vegas, NV, March 22-27
 * AAG 2010 Annual Meeting, Washington DC, April 13-18
 * AAG 2011 Annual Meeting, Seattle, WA, April 10-16
 * AAG 2012 Annual Meeting, New York, NY, February 24-28