OSCON 2008

Booth

• PercyD is in charge

Volunteers

• Brian, Will, Morgan

Summary

• traffic was reasonable, the conversations were often good. A pattern of specialty still exists - that is, a small handful of professionals had completed sometimes extensive projects and wanted to show them off to us on their laptops! While the majority of attendees had little exposure to the tech at all, however they had GPS units and wanted to figure out how to get free basemaps, or... Some interest in intro web mapping. Some awareness of FOSS4G in Cape Town.

• once again, a common theme is that people want data! and they want geocoding! This is Percy's third year doing OSCON, and there was a "groundhog day" feel to those kind of questions. Usually some guy has an idea about how to make money using LBS, but he doesn't want to give you all the details, so he's a little vague and talks about locating zipcodes and calculating distances between things.

• spoke with some media professionals.. they are aware of the strategic importance of the sector

• several companies expressed polite interest in getting developer attention through OSGeo

• Brian gets accolades from Percy for tireless, cheerful staffing of the booth! He put in at least twice as many hours as anyone else. Thanks Brian!!!

• Percy had a nice chat with Geoff Zeiss about "enterprise" open source GIS, and Geoff brought up a good point about the need for a standards based data-input constraint engine or something. I'm not sure where to go with it, so I'm just splattering it here...

• a picture of the booth will appear near here sometime soon.

• We (someone besides Percy) should talk to the O'Reilly folks about doing an OSGEO track next year :-)

• Percy thinks we can probably count on sharing space with opensourcelabs, PSU rocketry club, etc next year, if we want... It's not as plush and high visibility as having our own booth, but you can't beat the price!