Upcoming conferences (and 25% discount on Where 2.0!)

There are several conferences coming up that I wanted to mention, some of which I am speaking at.

First I should mention the GITA Geospatial Infrastructure Solutions Conference, which is in Tampa next week. I have had strong involvement with GITA since moving to the US in 1993, including five years on the GITA board (which I stood down from last December). I am sure the conference will be excellent as always, especially with the focus of the Obama administration on renewing US infrastructure providing some topical interest. This year for the first time they will be using Zerista to provide social networking and mapping services for attendees, so I'll be interested to hear how that goes (Zerista is the latest evolution of MapBuzz, founded by my friend Charlie Savage). It is with some sadness that I report that I won't be at the conference this year, the first one I will have missed since 1991!! I am sure I will be back again in future, but with my current focus on whereyougonnabe, and a limited startup budget :O, other conferences are higher on the list for me this year.

Which brings us on to Where 2.0, which I am actually attending for the first time this year, somewhat surprisingly - I have managed to have conflicting commitments for the past 2 or 3 years. I will be giving a five minute "Ignite" talk on the Tuesday evening, which I am looking forward to - I have done one Ignite format event before (20 slides which auto-advance every 15 seconds, for a total of 5 minutes) which I enjoyed, and have recently got into Presentation Zen and those ideas also lend themselves well to the format. I'll be mentioning several significant new developments we've been working on with whereyougonnabe, as part of discussing the challenges of modeling future location for social networking. And as a reader of this blog, you can get a 25% discount off registration by quoting the code WHR09FSP. Early registration ends tomorrow (April 14), so if you've been thinking about signing up now is a good time to do so! You can register here. I'm also planning to stay around afterwards to attend my first WhereCamp, which I'm also looking forward to.

Moving on to July, I am very tempted to try to make it over to Amsterdam for the State of the Map conference, the 3rd annual conference for OpenStreetMap - but haven't quite worked out if I will make it yet. I continue to find the growth of OpenStreetMap, and crowdsourced data in general, to be one of the most interesting trends in the geospatial industry at the moment, and I am sure this will be an excellent event. I am weighing up whether to submit a talk, and may well do so. I think that the (relatively) recent announcement of the Cloudmade development platform / API will help accelerate the growth in OpenStreetMap. In many ways the rapid growth of OpenStreetMap has been even more remarkable when you consider that the tools to build applications on top of the data have been relatively limited - the new Cloudmade development platform makes this much easier, which should result in a lot more applications based on OpenStreetMap data, which in turn will provide greater incentive for people to contribute to collecting and maintaining data.

And last but not least, I should mention the GeoWeb conference in Vancouver at the end of July (also organized by GITA together with Galdos). I've attended the past couple of years and presented last year (watch the video) and really enjoyed it both times - some good content, an interesting mixture of attendees from across the spectrum of the "neo" and "traditional" geo-camps (including a good number like myself who don't care too much for those labels and have a foot in both camps), and of course it's in beautiful Vancouver which as I've said before, I always like to visit. I've had a presentation accepted so will definitely be at this one.