FOSS4G 2009 Press Release 5

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FOSS4G 2009 Call for Workshops and Tutorials

Sydney, Australia. 28 January 2009.

The FOSS4G Organising Committee is pleased to announce the Call for Workshops and Tutorials for the 2009 conference, being held 20-23 October, 2009 in Sydney, Australia.

FOSS4G is the international "gathering of tribes" for open source geospatial communities, where developers and users show off their latest software and projects. 2009's theme of "User Driven" highlights the power of Open Source to integrate with existing systems and will launch the OGC's Climate Change Integration Plugfest (CCIP) which demonstrates standards based interoperability between Open Source and Proprietary geospatial applications.

Workshops and Tutorials allow presenters to lead attendees through applications, integration solutions, or other topics in an interactive environment. Half-day workshops (3 hours) will be held in computer rooms on the first day. Tutorials (90 minutes) will be held in standard presentation rooms, run concurrently with presentations during the third and fourth days.

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

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.

Tutorials

Tutorial rooms will not be equipped with computers so any hands-on aspects are the responsibility of the presenter and must be stated; the presenter 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 instructors that use the LiveDVD will help test it in the months before the conference when it is being produced. This will ensure tutorial material is compatible with the DVD and software is properly installed. To discuss your needs for the workshop computer configuration or LiveDVD, please contact the organising committee as per http://2009.foss4g.org/contacts/.

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Presenters are encouraged (but not mandated) to make use of scenarios and onsite data from the Climate Change Integration Plugfest (CCIP). This is especially important as demand for access to data over the internet is expected to be 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.

Submission instructions and templates are available at http://2009.foss4g.org/workshops/ and http://2009.foss4g.org/tutorials/.

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

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

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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