FOSS4G2008 LightningTalks

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On July 20 this page is a copy of the 2007 one. Tim Sutton and other I&APs will edit this appropriately for 2008 and remove this line when done.

= Introduction = Eight speakers, five minutes each, Lightning Talks will be presented to the full conference attendance, and should be fast paced, visual, and entertaining.

= Confirmed Speakers =

Schuyler Erle: Latent Semantic Analysis of the FOSS4G 2007 Conference Program

 * Troublemaker at Large
 * Schuyler is a long-time hacker, author, and Free Software activist.
 * With the help of a little linear algebra, we can analyze the anonymized program rankings collected before FOSS4G 2007, and infer some conclusions about the nature of the conference and its attendees.
 * 

Chris Schmidt: Understanding Software Patents

 * Software patents are a reality in today's global business environment. Learn how software patents affect you and the software you use and work on, and how open source projects can work together with the community and holders of software patents to protect themselves and their users.
 * Chris is a software developer for MetaCarta, Inc. where he works in part on developing OpenLayers, TileCache, and FeatureServer, and working with MetaCarta to create an environment where MetaCarta can foster and contribute to open source geospatial development.
 * URL to head shot

Ed McNierney: No One Wants 3/8-Inch Drill Bits

 * Chief Mapmaker, TopoZone.com
 * Ed's been a CTO / VP of Engineering kind of guy for almost 30 years, creating spreadsheets, educational children's games, high-performance graphics hardware, and medical imaging software; in 1999 he discovered he lived at the corner of four USGS topographic maps and it was absurdly difficult to put them together into one map, so he invented TopoZone.
 * TopoZone started with highly customized, proprietary map-serving software and evolved into one of the largest known MapServer installations. The switch to an Open Source platform made TopoZone revisit and refocus on how the business provided value to customers and what we were really doing on the Web.  The result was a valuable learning experience in what all of us are really doing on the Web, and why, and what our customers really care about.
 * URL to head shot

Arnulf Christl: Polluter-Pays-Principle Applied to Public Geodata

 * Title: Director, Organization: OSGeo
 * One sentence bio: Arnulf is Free Software advocate who started off as UNIX sysadmin on a Borg cube, turned to spatial, hacked some software and now makes a living out of orchestrating loosely distributed spatial data services and people living in them.
 * One sentence talk summary: Entities that change the environment should be obliged to document these changes following the Polluter-Pays-Principle to make the resulting geo data as freely accessible as air to breathe.
 * URL to head shot
 * URL to head shot

Andrew Turner: Title

 * Andrew Turner
 * Andrew develops several open-source tools such as GeoPress and Mapstraction, participates in the formulation of light-weight geospatial standards like GeoRSS and KML, and works for Mapufacture, building a geospatial aggregation and search service. He also wrote O'Reilly's Introduction to Neogeography.
 * Any suggestions for a talk?
 * Andrew Turner Head Shot

Norman Vine: Title

 * Title, Organization
 * One sentence bio
 * One sentence talk summary
 * URL to head shot

Scott Morehouse: Title

 * ESRI, Director of Software Development
 * One sentence bio
 * One sentence talk summary
 * URL to head shot

Peter Batty: The Past, Present and Future of the Geospatial Industry

 * Currently no fixed abode, most recently CTO of Intergraph
 * Peter has been CTO of Intergraph, Founder and CTO of Ten Sails, now Ubisense, and VP of Technology at Smallworld, now part of GE, and he is currently blogging and deciding what to do next.
 * This talk will summarize the past, present and future of the geospatial industry in five minutes!
 * A picture of Peter