FOSS4G 2009 Press Release 1

Sydney to host FOSS4G conference in 2009

"User Driven FOSS4G"

Sydney (Australia) selected to host the 2009 international conference for "Free & Open Source Software for GeoSpatial" (FOSS4G).

Monday, 18 February 2008

Aust-NZ OSGeo <A u s t - N Z @ l i s t s . o s g e o . o r g>

Cameron Shorter <c s h o r t e r @ l i s a s o f t . c o m>, +61 2 8570-5050

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The Australian/New Zealand chapter of OSGeo is pleased to announce that we have been selected to host the FOSS4G 2009 international conference. The conference is planned for Sydney in November 2009, and is expected to attract the leading users and developers in the open source geospatial community.

Holding this conference in the Asia-Pacific will bring enormous benefit to the region and provide the geospatial community with the opportunity to discover cutting edge spatial tools through to state of the art enterprise deployment.

Jeff McKenna, chairman of the OSGeo conference board summed up Sydney's bid. "The conference committee was overwhelmingly in support of Sydney's bid. Sydney's professional proposal, breadth of support from Government, Spatial and Tourist Industry, Enthusiasts and Academia demonstrated a passion that we have come to expect from OSGeo Conferences. Sydney's attractiveness and reputation as the gateway into Asia is an added bonus."

Cameron Shorter, System Architect at LISAsoft explained his motivations for leading Sydney's bid were not entirely altruistic, "For years I've wanted to attend FOSS4G's quality of presentations and meet attendees, but I've been held back by family commitments. So if I can't travel to FOSS4G, then why not bring it to me?"

The Oceania region has a reputation as being early adopters of Open Source as Steve Lime, founder of the mature Mapserver project notes, "Its about time FOSS4G came to Australia. Australians have been long time supporters of Open Source, including being the first users of Mapserver outside the University of Minnesota." Oceania also stands out as the region with highest usage of Firefox, the Open Source browser[1].

About OSGeo

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation has been created to support and build the highest-quality open source geospatial software. The foundation's goal is to encourage the use and collaborative development of community-led projects, data development and education.[2]

About OSGeo - Australia/New Zealand

The Australia/New Zealand chapter of OSGeo apply OSGeo principles locally. In particular, we focus on promotion and outreach.

About FOSS4G

FOSS4G is the international gathering of open source, geospatial tribes. The 2009 theme of "User Driven" reflects the migrating focus on users and integration of geospatial components into systems. The spatial industry is undergoing rapid innovations and the open source spatial community is one of the forces driving the change. From its beginnings the FOSS4G conference has been the gathering of the spatial tribes and has a reputation of being a melting pot for great ideas in the spatial industry and a catalyst for many successful geospatial products, standards and protocols. The 2007 conference was held in Victoria, BC, Canada and was a huge success[3]. 2008 conference will be held in Cape Town, South Africa[4]. FOSS4G 2009 Sydney will be the seventh "formal" gathering of the open source geospatial community and is expected to focus on the increasing importance of FOSS4G in the public and private enterprise.

[1] http://www.itwire.com/content/view/16329/53/

[2] http://osgeo.org

[3] http://www.foss4g2007.org

[4] http://www.foss4g2008.org

News reports

• Cameron Shorter's blog
• Office Of Spatial Data Management
• Corporate Research Center for Spatial Information
• Asian Surveying and Mapping
• Geographic Business Solutions (GBS), New Zealand