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!

WhereCamp5280 - cool event coming up in Denver!

We’ll be holding a fun, cool, educational and FREE geospatial event in Denver on August 14-15 – WhereCamp5280 (for those not from round here, 5280 is the elevation of Denver above sea level in feet – exactly one mile high!). If you’re already familiar with WhereCamp, you probably don’t need any more persuading to come along. The event is being organized by Eric Wolf, me, Ben Tuttle, and anyone else who would like to help out!

For those not familiar with WhereCamp, it’s an “unconference” on the subject of location, mapping and things "geo". An unconference is basically an informal conference which is organized on the fly by the participants. I’ve attended two unconferences now, both of which were excellent. The first was held by FRUGOS (Front Range Users of Geospatial Open Source), which you could also consider a predecessor to this event – though we intend for this to cover not just open source solutions (though that’s up to the participants, of course!). Here are a couple of reports on the FRUGOS unconference by me and Charlie Savage. The second was WhereCamp in San Jose this year, which I found really interesting and fun. I have to say that based on these two unconferences, the quality of presentations has been at least as good if not better than the “formal” conferences I have been to.

We have already had expressions of interest in attending from a wide variety of interesting geo-people, both locally and from out of town, so I’m sure there will be lots of great discussions. For an up to date list of people likely to attend check here.

If you are potentially interested in participating, please sign up to our Google Group and add your name to the likely attendee page. We encourage you to list topics that you would be interested in talking about or leading a discussion on, but this is definitely optional! While the agenda will certainly be flexible in unconference style, we plan to get some ideas together in advance to help us make the most of our time during the two days.

If you’re interested in helping out, please let me or Eric know. While DU has kindly donated the rooms for the event, we are aiming to get some modest sponsorship to be able to cover other costs including:

• A fun social event on Friday evening (probably either at the Wynkoop Brewing Company, or my loft which is right above the Wynkoop)
• Cost of projector rental from DU (which is not free) – if you have access to a projector(s) that we could use on Friday and/or Saturday, please let me know
• Lunch on Friday and Saturday

Please see the Google Group for more info – your questions, suggestions and assistance are appreciated! We really hope to make this a good venue for exchanging ideas between the “neogeographers”, open source users, and users of traditional GIS (and some of us, like me, fit into all of those camps). If you work in the geo area in Denver, tell your manager that this is the best free education you can get on the latest developments in the space!