FOSS4G keynote speakers announced

By on 19 March, 2013

FOSS4GSpeakers_630

The Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference, an international conference focused on open source geospatial software taking place in Nottingham, UK from 17th – 21st September 2013, has announced four world-renowned speakers from the open source community as keynote presenters.

Paul Ramsey co-founded the geospatial software company PostGIS in 2001, and has continued to support the open source geospatial community with his work in government and industry, winning the Sol Katz Award in 2008.

Kate Chapman, based in Jakarta, Indonesia, is the Acting Executive Director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), a non-governmental organization dedicated to helping support communities, governments and humanitarian responders in their utilization of the free and crowd-sourced map OpenStreetMap for crisis response and contingency planning.

They will be joined by Ian James the Chief Architect at Ordnance Survey responsible for the overall systems architecture. His 20 years of working in information systems has enabled him to work on a wide variety of Geospatial production systems, but more recently as the Technical Architect for the UK Location Programme.

Finally, attendees will hear from Edward Anderson (Open Development Technology Alliance at the World Bank) who coordinates the World Bank’s ICT Knowledge platform’s programme to use digital engagement tools for building greater public transparency and civic participation, as well as more accountability around public services.  His varied career as an aerospace engineer has led him to working and building new technical communities between NASA, Google, Random Hacks of Kindness, and CrisisCommons amongst others.

Each of these speakers will be bringing with them a wealth of knowledge of working with open source tools and data in a wide variety of application areas that will act to set the tone of the entire conference. As thought leaders in their respective fields, expect to be challenged in how Open Source software and data is being used, and can be used in the future, to change the world to a better place.

The theme for FOSS4G’13 is “Geo for All”, which reflects an aim to encourage attendance from anyone considering using open source and geospatial software for the first time. The numerous current initiatives propelling Open Data have highlighted to an even wider audience the benefits of using geospatial data to gain additional insights into their data. Add the current economic climate, and the interest in open source geospatial solutions grow ever stronger. These speakers provide an excellent opportunity to provide insight into the rising prominence of Open Source software and data.

Further information on the speakers is available at the FOSS4G conference website.

You may also like to read:


, , , , , , , ,


Newsletter

Sign up now to stay up to date about all the news from Spatial Source. You will get a newsletter every week with the latest news.

Interview: Tori Murrant, GIS analyst
Having stumbled across the geospatial sector at university, ...
Testing SouthPAN and commercial GNSS services
UNSW surveying students were challenged to put a range of So...
Here’s what’s in our latest issue!
Learn about the metaverse, mapmaking, 3D scanning, RINEX, hy...
Modern Methods of Construction Roadshow
The events will show how the latest software, tools and tech...
Real-time LiDAR mapping system
The Brumby LiDAR rapidly produces point clouds by removing t...