OSGeo at Spatial@Gov conference, Canberra, Australia

The Aust-NZ OSGeo local chapter set up and OSGeo booth at the Spatial@Gov conference a few days back, and I gave a well attended Geospatial Open Source presentation. The conference attracted ~ 200 delegates and covered:

• Climate Change (7 abstracts)
• Local Government (1 abstracts)
• Indigenous culture and communities (4 abstracts)
• Health (1 abstracts)
• Future directions of spatial technologies (24 abstracts)
• Public/Private partnerships (5 abstracts)
• Social Inclusion (4 abstracts)
• Not Specified (9 abstracts)

The conference was particularly encouraging for people interested in "Open Technologies". It was opened by Senator Kate Lundy, who is making a name for herself in Australia around Open Government (and who is also a keynote speaker at the FOSS4G conference in October). Then most of the presentations I attended mentioned Open Standards. In particular, there is a strong push to develop a "Spatial Marketplace" which is effectively a Spatial Data Infrastructure. I was pleasantly surprised to hear ~ 30% of the presentations mention how agencies are deploying Open Source software. And there was regular mention about how agencies are following Queensland's initiatives moving government data to Creative Commons licenses. (There are abstracts on this at FOSS4G too).
Thanks to the following people for helping to man the OSGeo stand:

• Milton Lofberg & Autodesk for sponsoring the booth
• Cameron Shorter (me) and LISAsoft for providing fliers and giving an Open Source presentation
• Bruce Bannerman
• Shoaib Burq
• Plus a couple of others who dropped by for a bit