FOSS4G2007

This is the main page for holding information for discussion on the upcoming FOSS4G 2007 conference held in the period of September 24 to 27. Links to resources and various ideas will be collected here.

Also of interest are:

Opening Plenary Session

9:00-9:15 Welcome from Chair

Welcome
Thank Sponsors
Promote Evening Events
Housekeeping

9:15-10:00 Sponsor Talks

One 15 minute talk by the Premier sponsor
Three 10 minute talks by the Platinum Sponsors

10:00-10:40 Lightning Talks

Howard Butler (hobu@hobu.net) will be coordinating the lightning talks. Some possible topics are provided below. Please add a topic and your name if you are interested in presenting a lightning talk.

We will be selecting no more than 8 lightning talks for the plenary session. You will have the whole conference watching, and using dual 30' projection screens, so being brisk and entertaining and providing lots of colorful pictures is a good idea.

The State of Mapguide
Big Mapserver Deployments
Desktop GIS: Conundrum?
Incredible GRASS Analyses
"Proprietary", "Open Source", "Commercial" and "Free"
- Arnulf Cristl
Spatial Databases are Fun

10:40-11:00 Coffee Break

Don't stray too far...

11:00-12:00 Keynote Address

Damian Conway - A terrific speaker and with a particular talk on open source for suits that will fit our mixed suit/geek attendance.

Presentations

In addition to general submissions, we should solicit talks from people with topics that have high levels of interest and current relevance. We should try to get off the beaten track of tools and projects (GRASS, PostGIS, Mapserver, Web Maps, standard GIS analysis with nonstandard toosl) we have heard at FOSS4G before into new areas. Some particular topics of interest might be:

Open Street Map and other distributed data creation schemes
Google Earth and KML generators
Worldwind and customizations of Worldwind

Closing Plenary Session

What to do with the closing plenary? Thank the organizers, distribute the parting gifts? Another speaker could be arranged, perhaps someone journalistic to do a "conference summary on the fly" talk. Or a rousing "call to arms" (Schuyler? Schuyler?).

Ideas welcome.

Panel Discussion

We have had some panel discussions, Q&A, in the past, but the format is getting less and less suitable to the venue and audience size. It is possible that it is time to move this sort of thing to a different part of the schedule.

Sol Katz Award

The Sol Katz Award is a quick item, which is a nice feel-good moment and a good fit for the closing plenary.

Wrap-up Keynote

Have a journalistic approach to the conference that bundles themes and things seen during the conference into a wrap-up that puts the conference into a larger industry and / or technology context. A tall order, but there are a few people who could do a good job of this.

Workshop Logistics

We have a limited number of laptops and a large demand for workshops. There are a few solutions:

Rent yet more laptops. Another $10K in the budget could net us another 40 or so laptops and probably drop our unit costs through volume.
String the workshops out over the conference. The rental is for a week, so only using the things for a day is pretty wasteful.
Go for UVIC labs. Hard to organize, requires transportation logistics, but could be doable.
What about "bring your own labtop" workshops? Attendees could be provided with bootable CD's ahead of time (download an image via web?). Requires presenters to get their act together sooner rather than later which isn't a bad thing.

New Ideas

Demo Studio

This conference will have the advantage of a tight layout in a conference center and dedicated show floor. As a result, we have the option of running a full-time demo studio on the show floor, with a big screen, sound and seating. There should be enough vendors with products to show and projects willing to take a 15 minute slot that we can keep it active through-out the exhibition.

Bear Pit

There is nothing so entertaining as watching people tear into each other on matters of principle. Rather than genial panel discussions, the Bear Pit brings two speakers together with a moderator charged with putting them at each others throats. Given the right combination of speakers, could be quite entertaining. The lecture theatre might make a nice venue for such a thing.

Integration Showcase

Now being planned at FOSS4G2007 IntegrationShowcase.

Use the show floor to show the Open Source stack all working together. Each vendor brings a part of the infrastucture.

Refractions - Big PostGIS server loaded with lots of data, uDig viewing and editing it
DM - Mapserver, Mapguide with Fusion
Autodesk - Mapguide
Camp2camp - CartoWeb
WhereGroup - Mapbender

Conference coordinator prepares an architecture diagram poster that shows each vendor, which component they have, and how those components use the other components. Vendors display the diagram with their areas highlighted.

Code Sprint

Now being planned at FOSS4G2007 CodeSprint.

On the Friday after the conference, arrange some empty rooms and internet connections for projects to have long format meetings and codings. If projects are interested in such a thing (a day of discussions, planning and coding) they should note themselves down here.

Geotools
GRASS Hack session
GDAL / Mapserver

Contents