FOSS4G 2009 Call for Workshops

We are delighted to welcome you to Sydney for the FOSS4G 2009 Conference, which will take place from Tuesday 20 - Friday 23 October, 2009. FOSS4G is heralded as the international "gathering of tribes" of open source geospatial communities, where developers and users show off their latest software and projects. The theme for 2009 is "User Driven", highlighting the power of Open Source to solve business problems.

We are pleased to offer you the chance to showcase your skills by helping to teach eager attendees in the use of your favorite application, integration solution, technology or other topic in an interactive, hands-on environment. Half-day workshops (3 hours) will be held on the first day of the conference, October 20th. Tutorials (90 minutes) will be held on the third and fourth days, October 22-23.

All workshop and tutorial submissions will be considered, but particular interest will be shown in the following topics:
 * Practical Introduction to Blah
 * Interoperability
 * Spatial Data Privacy and Security
 * Data Migration

Workshops are expected to be a hands-on experience with participants following along with the instructor, working directly with the software under discussion. All workshop rooms will be equipped with computers (two students sharing one system) to support this vision. Workshops will be running in a Windows XP environment and instructors are expected to provide any software necessary for the workshop. The use of LiveCD/DVD or other replacement operating system is possible but will be undertaken at the risk of the presenter.

Workshops are expected to require considerable effort to create, with past experience showing that three days of preparation per hour of presentation are required to produce a high quality workshop. Additionally you will be expected to develop material for attendees to take home with them, such as handouts, workbook, CD-ROMs etc.

Tutorial rooms will not be equipped with computers so any hands-on aspects are the responsibility of the presenter and must be stated; the tutorial may recommend participants to bring their own laptop. Most laptops can be expected to be running some version of the Windows operating system. FOSS4G LiveDVDs, based on the Xubuntu operating system, will be available at the conference and supplied to all attendees. These may be used in the Tutorials, or installation of software packages provided by the presenter may be part of the tutorial. Preference will be given to hands-on tutorials.

Due to the effort involved in producing and presenting a workshop, instructors will receive a single complementary registration to the conference for delivering a workshop. Presenters for tutorials will not be provided complementary registration.

Please visit our website to download the submission templates and instructions for submission of workshops  and tutorials .

The deadline for workshop / tutorial submissions is March 2, 2009.