FOSS4G:UK South West 2024 - Bristol
It was great to attend FOSS4G:UK South West 2024 in Bristol on 12th Nov, at OSGeo:UK’s now regular Bristol Venue, The Engine Shed. The event was a sell out and we had 62 people in the Engine Shed’s main room.
This was the first time in a while that I have been to a FOSS4G:UK as an attendee rather than as an organiser - and it made a nice difference! We had 14 great presentations, covering a whole range of topics including digitalization of railways, reproducible science, real time vessel monitoring, landscape heritage, open source funding, cloud native web apps and a whole variety of useful open source tools.
Unfortunately I missed the first presentation - thanks Great Western Railways! - but one common theme that cropped up a lot was how social media as a tool for open source projects has changed dramatically. James Milner said that social media used to be a great way to promote his program, Terra Draw, but know he gets no where near the same impact from using social media. It’s now a bit of a big unknown, and I particularly liked how he summarised this:
Interestingly, I sent out a number of social media posts to Twitter (X), Mastodon and LinkedIn, and LinkedIn got the most response, so make of that what you will! Although I think it’s fair to say LinkedIn is not universally loved, as it was memorably described as “Grindr for Business” by Andrew Bailey!
- Twitter (X) 1 retweet, 7 likes
- Mastodon 3 boosts, 3 favorites
- LinkedIn 6 comments, 4 reposts
The presenters have also mastered the use of memes, with Matt Travis hitting home with some of the perils of waiting for large data sets to load:
and of course also
It was also fantastic to get FAIR Open Science and FAIR workflows mentioned in the presentation by Richard Conway & Garin Smith from Telespazio, who are in the process of developing an exploration platform that allows researchers both to share their data, code and their methods in a reproducible form.
I also had the opportunity to speak about GoFundGeo and talk about how OSGeo:UK is funding a range of open source geospatial projects that will have an impact in the UK. Join the OSGeo:UK mailing list or check the website to find out more.
Finally, as ever, it was great to meet new people and network again with old friends at these events. I know of at least one contract opportunity, as well a number of potential ones and also I think some new volunteers for OSGeo:UK!
Thanks very much to all the organisers - Pascal Coulon, Alastair Graham, Sam Franklin, Dan Ormsby, Illya Sparkes-Santos, Ant Scott, as well as everyone who came along and took part.
If you want help or advice on any open source geospatial tool, or are interested in Introductory or Advanced GIS training in QGIS or R, please do contact me.