Back from FOSS4G

In my experience, FOSS4G was tons of fun and very well run. Chapeau to the organizing team! I hope other attendees got as much out of the conference as I did. Not only did I get to catch up with people I met at the dawn of FOSS4G, I met great people I'd only known from Twitter and made entirely new acquaintances. I even got to speak a bit of French.

My talk was one of the first in the general sessions. I had fun presenting and am told that I did a good job. My slides are published at http://sgillies.github.io/foss4g-2014-fiona-rasterio/ and you can fork them from GitHub. According to the information at the FOSS4G Live Stream page all the talks will be available online soon. I missed plenty that I'm looking forward to seeing on my computer. Out of the ones I attended, I particularly recommend seeing the following:

  • "Using OpenStreetMap Infrastructure to Collect Data for our National Parks" by James McAndrew, National Park Service

  • "Managing public data on GitHub: Pay no attention to that git behind the curtain" by Landon Reed, Atlanta Regional Commission

  • "Big (enough) data and strategies for distributed geoprocessing" by Robin Kraft, World Resources Institute

  • "An Automated, Open Source Pipeline for Mass Production of 2 m/px DEMs from Commercial Stereo Imagery" by David Shean, University of Washington

Did the code of conduct work? I heard one speaker invoke images of barely competent moms – "so easy your mother can do it" – and was present for a unfortunate reference to hacking private photos at lunch time. I hope that was all of it.

If you attended FOSS4G or watched the live feed I encourage you to write about your experience and impressions. Come on, do it. It doesn't have to be long or comprehensive. Here are a few blog posts I've seen already: