WhereCamp5280 is almost upon us!

As I have posted about previously, I'm helping to organize a cool, and FREE, "geo-unconference" in Denver called WhereCamp5280 (5280 = the altitude of Denver in feet, for those not from round here!), which is now almost upon us - it's this Friday and Saturday, August 14-15. We've been really pleased with the response - check out the list of likely attendees and potential talks (being an unconference, the schedule isn't fixed in advance - and there will be a lot more talks and discussion topics added "on the fly" during the event).

We initially thought it would just be a local event, but we have quite a lot of distinguished visitors from around the country, including founder of OpenStreetMap Steve Coast, uber-geoblogger James Fee, Executive Director of OSGeo Tyler Mitchell, ESRI product gurus Bern Szukalski and Victoria Koujoumjian from Redlands, and more. We have a lot of founders of local geo startups coming along, including Martin May of Brightkite, Andrei Taraschuk of UMapper, Duncan McCall of PublicEarth, Charlie Savage of Zerista, Tom Churchill of Churchill Navigation, and Brian Timoney of the Timoney Group. Oh and me :). We have geogeektv stars Dave Bouwman and Brian Noyle. And loads of local geospatial software users and developers who are doing lots of cool things with all kinds of technologies - and sorry to all the attendees I haven't mentioned by name ... I guess I really shouldn't have started this list, it will get me into trouble with someone! (The beer's on me at the social event if I missed you off the list!).

Talking of which, we've also had a great response from sponsors, which is really gratifying in the current economy - thanks a lot to our gold sponsor ESRI, silver sponsors Bohannan Huston, DTSAgile and PublicEarth, bronze sponsors Enspiria Solutions, A Mountain Top and UMapper, media sponsor AnyGeo / GISuser, and facilities sponsor GTAC at DU.

I'm looking forward to a really fun and interesting event. The sessions will be at University of Denver in Sturm Hall, and we'll have a fun social event on Friday night at my loft above the Wynkoop Brewing Company. There's still time to sign up - hope to see you there!