EGU Townhall 2014

First OSGeo Townhall at EGU 2014

Held at the European Geoscience Union (EGU) General Assembly 2014 (April 29, 2014).

Executive Summary

This is a report on the OSGeo EGU townhall 2014 project. Aim of the project was to raise awareness/reach-out to the European geoscience community by hosting a dedicated public OSGeo event at the largest European geoscience conference. The project was a success. All goals were reached.. This report details preparation, execution, aftermath and lessons learned.

Background Info

What is the European Geoscience Union (EGU)?

The European Geosciences Union (EGU) is dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in the geosciences and the planetary and space sciences for the benefit of humanity, worldwide. It was established in September 2002. It is a non-profit international union of scientists with over 12,500 members from all over the world. Membership is open to individuals who are professionally engaged in or associated with geosciences and planetary and space sciences and related studies, including students and retired seniors. EGU is organised in so called divisions (22), which have specific thematic foci within geosciences.

What is an EGU General Assembly ?

The annual EGU General Assembly (GA) is the largest and most prominent European geosciences event. This years GA attracted over 12,000 scientists from all over the world, of which more than a quarter are students. The meeting’s sessions, typically over 500, cover a wide range of topics. General Assemblies have around 14,000 submissions (oral presentations and posters). Aside from disciplinary sessions, dealing with the topics covered by each scientific division, the meeting also features Union-wide sessions, including townhall sessions. In 2014 there were 13 townhall sessions.

Townhall Meeting are official EGU meetings, open for all participants in the conference. During these meetings new initiatives or decisions are announced to a larger audience following an open discussion on the matter. Townhall Meetings last 60 minutes in the evening and take place in the conference centre’s lecture rooms, fit 50 to 350 people, and are announced in the Programme (Information & Schedule Book). As they are staged in the evening after the scientific sessions, Townhalls attract large crowds.

Splinter Meetings

are informal side meetings on non-commercial purposes organized by participants. They can be organized during the course of the conference and they can be public or by invitation only. Splinter Meetings last up to 90 minutes and are held during the day. Scientific sessions are held in parallel, which could prevent people potentially from attending. They fit 36 to 60 people and are announced in the Programme (Information & Schedule Book) if booked early.

OSGeo related background

FOSS GIS and the role of OSGeo affect most if not all EGU divisions, as the paradigm of good scientific practice (open data and open source for transparency) is now changing all over geoscience. Since 2012, there have been FOSS GIS themed events at the EGU General assembly. OSGeo-related activities started with an improvised Splinter Session (compares to Birds of a Feather (BoF) meetings) which drew a surprisingly large crowd in 2012. This was arranged by Alessandro Frigeri (Italy) and Peter Löwe (Germany).

At least since 2006, references to OSGeo software projects and other FOSS tools appear in the poster sessions (> 9000 posters) every year. In 2013, the first call for a EGU session on FOSS GIS in the Earth and Space Science Informatics (ESSI) received imediately sufficient interest from the science community to conduct both both oral presentations and a posters session. In 2014 there were two dedicated FOSS sessions (ESSI and Hydrology Diviisons). This is a significant step ahead: By now, researchers can successfully apply to attend this EGU conference, to showcase the FOSS aspects of their work. Before this, everything “FOSS” had to be relabelled since no session would address the topic.

There were two reasons why to consider a genuine OSGeo event at EGU in 2014: Firstly, the role and significance of OSGeo for geoscience still needed to be introduced at a cross-cutting venue (top-down). Secondly, experience shows that FOSS is already emergent in several other EGU divisions. So an event was needed beyond the rigid EGU division structure to allow all the different FOSS stakeholders to meet (bottom-up).