FOSDEM 2018: the Geospatial devroom

Sunday, February 4th, was the second day of FOSDEM and the day dedicated to the Geospatial devroom. Back from the times when I was active in OSGeo, I co-organised a developer room focused on mapping technology, that hosted presentations for the whole day.

This year we had 15 talks about a broad variety of topics:

 

Intro Geospatial devroom	Johan Van de Wauw
Join the FREEWAT family FREEWAT (FREE and open source software tools for WATer resource management)	Pieter Jan Haest
Bicycle-sharing stations: profiling and availability prediction	Raphaël Delhome
Pronto Raster: A C++ library for Map Algebra	Alex Hagen-Zanker
GDAL Tips and Tricks GDAL installation, Python usage, and Cloud GeoTIFFs	Jeremy Mayeres
GRASS GIS in the sky GRASS GIS as high-performance remote sensing toolbox	Markus Neteler, Moritz Lennert, Markus Metz
GeoPandas: easy, fast and scalable geospatial analysis in Python	Joris Van den Bossche
Open source Big Geospatial Data analytics	Marc Vloemans
Spatial Support in MySQL 8.0	Norvald H. Ryeng
Distance computation in Boost.Geometry	Vissarion Fysikopoulos
Building Rock Climbing Maps with OpenStreetMap	Viet Nguyen
Building OSM based web app from scratch How to find the way through the open source jungle	Nils Vierus
Privacy aware city navigation with CityZen app The free open source app that let’s you explore your city and contribute to OSM	Redon Skikuli
Every subway network in the world	Ilya Zverev
Rendering map data with Mapnik and Python	Hartmut Holzgraefe
Efficient and interactive 3D point cloud processing Combining the strengths of pdal, ipyvolume and jupyter	Mathieu Carette
AMENDMENT Mapping FOSDEM for accessibility	Johan Van de Wauw

As I helped Johan with the devroom organisation, I was in the room for the whole day except a couple breaks, and listened to all presentations. There are a few that I liked more, but what fascinated me was the variety of topics that the presenters offered to the audience, and that kept my interest always high. Coming from an OSGeo background made me think too: I thought that most (at least big) projects were part of OSGeo Foundation, but at every FOSDEM I discover projects that have their user-base, history and solidity, and were unknown to me. It makes me believe that geospatial technology is more widespread than what OSGeo shows, and there are a lot of actors who don’t see the need to belong to the Foundation. It doesn’t have to be the goal, it’s more a reality check for me.

If you are interested in these talks, you can watch the video recordings and browse the slides used during the presentation. They are available in the pages linked to the table above.