FOSS4G 2009 Press Release 5

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FOSS4G 2009 Call for Workshops and Tutorials

Sydney, Australia. 2 February 2009.

The Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference is pleased to announce a 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. As such, expect to see presentations about Proprietary products integrating with Geospatial Open Source, as well as Pure Open Source presentations.

FOSS4G 2009 Highlights

The Climate Change Integration Plugfest (CCIP): FOSS4G will launch the OGC's Climate Change Integration Plugfest (CCIP), which demonstrates standards based interoperability between Open Source and Proprietary geospatial applications. It consists of a server with multiple virtual machines, each installed with geospatial applications offering standards based web services. All web services will demonstrate a common dataset, and will be accessed by a range of geospatial client applications installed on client computers. http://external.opengis.org/twiki_public/bin/view/ClimateChallenge2009/WebHome

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.

FOSS4G Live DVD: LiveDVDs, based on the Xubuntu operating system, and including Geospatial Open Source Software, will be given to all delegates. Users can boot a Live DVD on their computer and trial the software without installing or effecting the existing system. The DVD will be a great marketing tool, and can be incorporated into Tutorials. http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc

Installfest: After workshops on the first day, delegates will have the opportunity to mingle with presenters, test their LiveDVD, and iron out any laptop glitches before Tutorials in the following days.

Workshops and Tutorials: 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 ____
• Integrating Geospatial Open Source with ____
• Geospatial Data
• Spatial Data Privacy and Security

Presentations:

Birds of a Feather: Rooms have been set aside for semi-organised meetings between like minded groups. Some prominant community initiatives started in prior FOSS4G Birds of a Feather sessions.

Code Sprint: The weekend after FOSS4G is reserved for the Hackers' Code Sprint. Hackers will be locked in a basement with lots of bandwidth, pizzas and coke. (Well, maybe something better than that, but we don't want to spoil the mystical hacker image by describing it any differently.)

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Workshops

Workshops are expected to be a hands-on experience with participants following along with the instructor, working directly with the application 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 need to discuss pre-installation requirements with the Conference Organising Committee if required.

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.

Tutorials

Tutorial rooms will not be equipped with computers, however presenters may optionally make use of delegate laptops and the FOSS4G LiveDVD.

At least 80% of delegates are expected to be carrying a laptop and FOSS4G LiveDVDs will be given to all delegates.

Preference will be given to hands-on tutorials.

Any hands-on aspects to a tutorial will be the responsibility of the presenter and needs to be described in the tutorial description. Presenters making use of the Live DVD or CCIP will be expected to contribute to testing pre-releases to ensure material 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/.

Sweeteners

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.

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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
• 2 Mar 2009, Call for Workshops/Tutorials closes
• 9 Mar 2009, Call for Abstracts opens
• 30 Mar 2009, Notification of acceptance for workshops/tutorials
• 13 Apr 2009, Registration for conference and tutorials opens
• 1 Jun 2009, Abstract submission deadline
• 13 Jul 2009, Presenters notified of acceptance for talks
• 31 Jul 2009, Author/Early registration deadline
• 14 Sep 2009, Completed program available on the wiki
• 20 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Workshop
• 21-23 Oct 2009, FOSS4G Presentations and Tutorials
• 24-25 Oct 2009, FOSS4G 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