FOSS4G'13: State of The Map, Birmingham

State of The Map, Birmingham

Posted by Mark Iliffe on February 17, 2013

Birmingham has been blessed with getting State of The Map this year. We should welcome our OSM cousins attending, however there are a few advance points of interest;

There is a long difference in the dates between SoTM and FOSS4G (potentially this could be changed from the 6-8th of September to 13-15th of September)

Could we offer a 'WFN (Work From Nottingham)' package: (uni) accommodation for those who do not wish to travel home, but still attend both conferences?
Tie in with bursaries?
What are the lines of communication between the groups and how do we collaborate?

I will be attending (and probably submitting a paper to SoTM), however are there points with regard to the program that we will want to work on?

I think we need to be proactive on this. Thoughts/comments/points of action?

Comments

Barry Rowlingson on February 18, 2013:

The SoTM guys seem to be stuck with their dates so the week gap looks inevitable:

http://blog.osmfoundation.org/2013/02/16/state-of-the-map-2013-birmingham/

My thoughts about the programme are how we deal with OSM-related presentation submissions. I don't think we insist on the academic rigour of presentations not being presented before, so if someone does the same talk at OSM then there's fundamentally not a problem of them doing a replay at FOSS4G. Except that we don't want all the people interested in OSM to come to FOSS4G and go "oh, seen that, seen that, seen that" and then we get an OSM session with no audience.

Another possibility is that people will submit to both, get accepted by both, and then pull out of one later. This could happen either way, with presentations being pulled from SoTM or FOSS4G, so something both groups should be aware of.

I notice their proposal includes a digital and physical map art exhibition. Perhaps Rollo and Kenneth could get in touch with them and the exhibition's second stop could be Nottingham!

I definitely think there is value in partnership, even if its only us mentioning SoTM on our web pages and they mention FOSS4G on theirs.

Barend Köbben on February 18, 2013:

It's a pity they couldn't align it (or we couldn't ;-) re. the line of communications: I regularly meet Henk Hoff, one of the foundation board members (and a Dutch person) at various geo-things in the Netherlands, but I am not sure hwo much the foundation is involved in the SotM organisation...

Rollo Home on February 18, 2013:

If there is going to be any sort of coordination (which there clearly should be), it needs to be between clearly defined individuals on both camps. A few people on FOSS4G have strong links with the SoTM team (I don't!) - so who wants to lead on that? Individual 'actions' can be delegated once identified (such as the Map Gallery idea Barry raised), but we'd still someone to have an overview....

Mark Iliffe on February 18, 2013:

I've reached out to a friend/Taarifan on the LoC of SoTM. I can do cursory intel.