\title{FOSS4G 2006 Conference: The meeting of the tribes}
\author{by Helena Mitasova}

\maketitle

The Free and Open Source Software for Geoinformatics (FOSS4G,
\url{http://www.foss4g2006.org}) Conference held  in Lausanne, Switzerland
in September 2006 was a great success.  It was the first joint conference 
that brought together the different FOSS4G "tribes", 
merging the GRASS Users conference series, with the Mapserver, EOGEO and
Java developers meetings. Hundreds of people, including software developers,
power users and newcomers, had a
chance to meet, discuss projects and present new developments and ideas.
More than 25 hands-on workshops were offered providing an opportunity for 
the participants to learn established and new software tools. Five sold out
GRASS workshops were offered including advanced topics such as visualization
and lidar data processing. In addition to the plenary 
sessions, more than 120 presentations were given in eight parallel
sessions covering wide range of topics and projects, from Webmapping and desktop
GIS to Geodata and OGC standards. The GRASS sessions included presentations
on hydrologic modeling, urban planning applications, processing of 
massive data, support for hazard and emergency response management, visualization,
python tools and many others. Jim Westervelt from USA CERL discussed the
evolution of GRASS from public domain to FOSS4G in his keynote.
All workshop material and presentation slides are available online
Videos and conference photos from the conference
are also available on the FOSS4G website under "Souvenirs".
Several informal brainstorming sessions were organized as "birds-of-a-feather"
(BOF) meetings to work out open access to geospatial data issues, seed
national user groups, start new programming projects and more.

During the final afternoon several keynote talks were given as well as a
discussion panel on FOSS4G "politics". Also the second annual Sol Katz
award for important contributions of an open source GIS community
member was presented. This year Markus Neteler from the Center for
Scientific and Technological Research (ITC-irst, Italy) was honored,
recognizing his instrumental work on the GRASS GIS project. Congratulations
to Markus for the well deserved award thanks for all the work
that he has done for GRASS, keeping it growing and getting better
for the past 10 years.

The excellent conference organization was carried out by
Camptocamp, the University of Lausanne, the Swiss Federal Institute of
Technology (EPFL) and the University of Applied Sciences, Western
Switzerland. The conference attendance by far exceeded all previous meetings.
Great social events accompanied the technical parts of the conference.

The recently established Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo,
\url{http://www.osgeo.org}) was introduced during the conference
and offered an information booth as a focal point for learning more about the
foundation and how to get involved. The foundation will take lead on
future meetings in the FOSS4G series; the upcoming \textbf{FOSS4G2007}
will be held in Victoria, Canada from \textbf{24-27 September
 2007}.


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