wherecamp – edparsons.com

2.0 is rather passé in tech circles these days, so it now the O’Reilly’s Where Conference!

The annual meeting of the Geo tribes, this year takes place in downtown San Francisco in early April.

This is, despite the competition, the main conference to attend and along with it’s unofficial Wherecamp sister (this years date and location still in planning). It is worth a trip just to soak up the atmosphere of innovation and plain optimism you will not find at more traditional GIS conferences.

That said this year I will be stuck this side of the Atlantic that week attending other events, but many Googlers will be presenting and as an old hand O’Reilly have provided me with a conference discount code offering 20% of registration fees, so if you are going feel free to use the code “PARS20“.

Hope you like the new more stream lined blog design, I took the opportunity this weekend to update things when I moved domain and server hosting from GoDaddy (I know shameful) to an excellent UK operation tsohost, who have real support people answering email at 11pm on a saturday night !

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

Camping Geowanking style

From Wherecamp 2008

This weekend the geowankers camped out at the Googleplex for the second Wherecamp.

What has become an annual event the weekend after Where 2.0, Wherecamp is an unconference, a self organised event which starts without an agenda, and features talks, hacking sessions and debates suggested by the people who turn up. As Andrew Turner captured so successfully on twitter, “#wherecamp is Where2.0 2009 beta, 2010 alpha”, or maybe the other way round ?

The camp featured many excellent presentations and discussions, The value of 3D data (aka “Is 3D shit ?” ), building 3D displays, cartography for the web, geosearch, data licensing, micro formats etc., and because of the nature of the event plenty of opportunity for practical demonstrations, including the creation of gigipan images by Rich Gibson.

Gigiapan
click to see gigapan at work

And Jeff Johnson of PictEarth capturing aerial photography of the Googleplex using a Nokia N95, in an r/c model aircraft..

Googleplex from an airborne N95

As an old geezer I skipped the camping part, retreating to the comfort of my hotel room rather than a google tent for the night, but it was a great format and a great event. The contrast to the established GIS conferences in Europe is marked, the barcamp format, provides a great opportunity for more open debate and the presentation of ideas rather than products, and it’s just great fun.

EuroWherecamp Anyone ?

Written and submitted from the Googleplex, using the Google 802.11 network.