FOSS4G 2009 Press Release 5

FOSS4G 2009 Call for Workshops and Tutorials

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 a personal and interactive 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. Workshop computers will pre-installed with a basic image containing standard packages running in a Windows XP environment. Instructors will be required to discuss their needs with the conference organising committee if they will need software pre-installed.

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. 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.

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. Preference will be given to hands-on tutorials.

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 Workshops as needed. It is expected that any instructor or presenter that will use the LiveDVD will make themselves available to test while it is being produced in the months before the conference. This will ensure that you material is compatible with the DVD and that the appropriate software is properly installed. To discuss your needs for the workshop computer configuration or LiveDVD, please contact the organising committee using the mechanisms described at http://2009.foss4g.org/contacts/.

Presenters are encouraged to make use of scenarios and onsite data from the Climate Change Integration Plugfest (CCIP) if appropriate. This is especially critical as demand for access to data over the internet is expected to be very high, and Australia has notoriously slow connections to the outside world. Contact details for the CCIP are available at http://external.opengis.org/twiki_public/bin/view/ClimateChallenge2009/WebHome.

Please visit our website to download the submission templates and instructions for submission of workshops <http://2009.foss4g.org/workshops/> and tutorials <http://2009.foss4g.org/tutorials/>.

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

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For information about this announcement, contact:

Cameron Shorter

Chair of the FOSS4G Organising Committee and Geospatial Systems Architect at LISAsoft

tel +61-8570-5050

c a m e r o n . s h o r t e r @ l i s a s o f t . c o m

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Sydney, Australia. 2 February 2009.

FOSS4G is the international "gathering of tribes" for 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 integrate with existing systems. The OGC's Climate Change Integration Plugfest (CCIP) to be launched will demonstrate standards based interoperability between Open Source and Proprietary geospatial applications. The CCIP will be a major draw-card for Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) sponsors looking for standards based spatial solutions. http://external.opengis.org/twiki_public/bin/view/ClimateChallenge2009/WebHome

Upcoming milestones

• 2 Feb 2009, Call for Workshops/Tutorials opens
• 9 Mar 2009, Call for Abstracts opens
• 13 Apr 2009, Registration for conference and tutorials opens
• 31 Jul 2009, Author/Early registration deadline
• 20-23 Oct 2009, FOSS4G
• 24-25 Oct 2009, Code Sprint