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FOSS4G UK Online 2020

By Anonymous
So we're all locked down, to some degree or another, and our favourite FOSS4G conferences (due to be held this year in Calgary and Valmiera inter alia) are cancelled.... what to do? The OSGeo:UK committee, seeing a chance to organise a conference without having to worry about catering/ venues/ accommodation/ swag/ entertainment, decided to do what everyone else was doing and do it online! If you missed it, this is how it went.

In figures

From the OSGeo wiki:
  • 1,000 people registered
  • 600 or so attended on the day
  • 8 themes: 🗃️ Metadata, 🏛️ Platform, 🗺️ Mapping, 🚜 Land, 🌍 Earth Observation, 🛤️ Geospatial, 😷 Covid19, 🖥️ Geoserver
  • 3 streams: 🐦 Nightingale, 🛰️ Sentinel, ⛵ Mercator
  • 460 people online at the peak
  • 77 countries represented, 52% from outside the UK
  • 33 presentations, with 38 presenters
  • 95% of delegates rated the event very good or excellent
  • 47% made a donation to OSGeo or MapAction, raising around £2,500 in all
  • 2,500 views of recordings on the YouTube channel
  • £200 expenses to put on

Astun contributions

As this is the Astun blog, we can get away with highlighting the contributions from Astun staff:

What else?

The standard of presentations was consistently high, with presenters from across the spectrum of open source geo. Everyone will have their favourites, but we were interested by:

Feedback

As evidenced from the post-conference survey, the day seemed to have gone well:

Donate

And finally, if you haven't already, consider a donation - the conference was (and is) free, but  OSGeo:UK or MapAction both need your support!

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