Location Intelligence 2006

Location Intelligence is an annual conference put on by Directions Magazine. The agenda had a higher portion of OSGeo activities than previous years, as Directions is one of the bigger champions of Open Source Geospatial. There was a panel entitled 'Why Should the CXO Care About Open Source Geospatial Products?' which Gary Lang, Dave McIlhagga, and Chris Holmes sat on, in addition to Brian Timoney, who none of us had met but who complemented our points nicely.

The best quote was from Gary, on a question posed to the panel: "The barriers to adoption of open source technology in geospatial are mental."

Chris Holmes also gave a Presentation on ever-increasing ROI, available for everyone to reuse (including nice animations for you to 'borrow'). Both the panel and the presentation were positively recieved.

As for notes from the attendees:

• Gary says:

'Many people came up to us afterwards and said how enlightening the OS panel discussion was. Of possible interest: I think we went a ways towards convincing other companies like Autodesk that maybe, just maybe, they should be moving some of their work out into open source as well. I had two conversations tonight that gave me hope that the wheels are spinning at those companies.

As long as the OSGeo continues to be seen in the current light, many things are possible.'

• Dave says

'I share Gary's feelings on this. Having done many outreach discussions re. Open source over the years -- being able to point others in the industry to a real 'entity' in OSGeo is a huge step forward.

Once we get our act together re. Outreach materials (and we will!) This message will only get better and more powerful.

Interesting event -- a significant number of companies represented here who are adopting or are in serious consideration about open source. Some big players you might not expect. Message is key right now to win over those standing on the ledge wondering if they should jump.'

• Chris concurs, he's writing this. It was a step forward, was very nice to have a single entity to point people at. Many were open to the message, are starting to get their heads around it all. This was definitely a business oriented crowd, and the thoughts were oriented more around mashups, but I only see open source becoming more and more important. Lots of good feedback from a number of individuals.