OSGeo at GeoWeb2006 Report

This is the "after action report" on our attendence at GeoWeb 2006 (OSGeo_at_GeoWeb2006).

Summary

GeoWeb 20006 had ~250 attendees, up from ~100 in previous years (when it was called GML Days). It is a less technical conference than it used to be, but attracts developers, product managers, execs, etc. The event has no open source component.

Our attendence was limited to a couple presentations and some flyers. Given the minimal expense -- basically just the flyers (which I covered anyway) -- it was certainly worth it in that we simply continued to spread the Open Source message to more people.

Presentations

• mpg presented his "Introduction to OSGeo" presentation (30-40 in attendence)
  • did get stumped by one question ("copyright policy for contributed projects?"), oops
  • I will put my slides on the "library" pages
  • gave away the last Where 2.0 shirt :-)

• mpg did two panel sessions (representing both OSGeo and LizardTech)

• Gary gave his "why Autodesk went to open source" keynote - went well, is available for podcast at [[1]]

• Ian T. presented a paper (I didn't get to see it, sorry)

Booth

We did not have an OSGeo-specific booth, but Autodesk did allow us to put some flyers in their booth. I had made up a few dozen "booklets" consisting of the per-project flyers, plus a several dozen of Tyler's new one-page overview flyer -- the Autodesk guys were nice enough to push them out to people. (I was not able to spend any time at the booth.)

Only a dozen or so of the 1-page flyers were left at the end.

Misc

• Our own Jason B was there for a day (attending one of my (non-OSGeo) talks).

• Geoff Z. from Autodesk and a few others mentioned OSGeo and our efforts during their own presentations

• mpg got a number of people asking questions, etc, after his presentation

• One exec from a small but well known GIS company said he'd like to join us (mpg will forward details to FunCom).

• mpg got to meet Lisa L -- seems to have a good background for what we need!

• mpg was unable to participate in the meetup; not sure if it happened in the end or not

• (and mpg and Gary had a nice dinner, too)

• got some nice/appreciative comments from some OGC execs, too