FOSS4G Registration Metrics

With excitement building around the 2010 conference for Free and Open Source Software for GeoSpatial, http://2010.foss4g.org, I think it is timely to share registration metrics from previous conferences (from 2006 to 2009).

Some key highlights from the metrics are:

• FOSS4G traditionally attracts ~ 50% of its delegates from the locally hosted country, and up to 75% of its delegates from the local region. This highlights the value of moving the FOSS4G conference around the world as it boosts exposure to local communities. This metric also helps predict attendance numbers based on region population densities. Small nations in the middle of the Ocean, like Australia have less delegates to draw upon, but we should see big attendance numbers coming into Barcelona this year.
• Over 80% of people heard about the conference virally, via a friend, email list, blog, etc. Despite us having contra-deals and advertisements with many geospatial magazines, only 1% heard about the conference through a magazine. Lesson for organisors: focus on viral marketing.
  
• 3/4 of the delegates are technical.
• Half the local registrations come in late, after the early bird registration. In Barcelona with expected high numbers, it might mean that the conference organisors will need to turn away late registrations.
  

I'd love to see some of these metrics built into map displays. If you are a mapping wizard, you might want to create some fancy maps with these figures. Please let me know if you do, and I'll reference them from this blog.

LISAsoft awarded three innovation grants for SLIP Enabler

Over the last two years, Landgate has invited proposals for Developer Innovation Grants to build innovative applications that utilises the Shared Land Information Platform (SLIP). SLIP delivers web data services for a wide range of Western Australian and national geospatial data though a standards-based Spatial Data Infrastructure.

The SLIP Innovation Grants are awarded for innovative ideas in the development of commercial applications and new uses of SLIP datasets. LISAsoft is proud to be awarded three of five of this year’s grants.

“LISAsoft’s proposals fitted very closely with our users needs, and we see them providing significant value to the future of SLIP.” Darren Mottolini, Landgate Business Consultant.

Winning Ideas:

PostGIS Shapefile Loader GUI

The current process for appending a shapefile to an existing PostGIS table involves command line tools and scripts. This project will produce a GUI interface for loading a shapefile to a PostGIS database.

Automated Layer Creation

By streamlining the current manual process of metadata collection, agencies will be able to leverage SLIP for high currency data services.

Big Red Basemap Feedback

“Big Red” provides the ability to markup base map information with instructions to create, update and delete features and review update history from a web page. Crowd sourcing will be used to clean and improve datasets.

Would you like to work on innovative projects, using Geospatial Standards, Open Source, and Geospatial Technologies? LISAsoft is hiring. Contact me if interested.