FOSS4G:UK Local 2023

Thurs 7th Sept 2023

FOSS4G:UK Local 2023 is now over! Thanks to everyone who took part

We will be making videos available through YouTube in due course.

Full programme overview: PDF, Google Sheets. See individual venue pages for more details

OSGeo:UK will be bringing together all those interested in free and open source software for geospatial (FOSS4G) for this fantastic event. If you use, promote, develop or want to learn about open source tools and open data for geospatial, then this conference is for you! A whole day of talks, workshops and networking across the UK and Ireland. Take a look at our previous programmes for FOSS4G:UK Local 2022, FOSS4GUK Online 2020 and FOSS4GUK 2019 in Edinburgh to get a flavour of things to come!

This will be a hybrid conference, but with a twist: there will be no central physical location. We have eight venues geographically dispersed across the UK and Ireland, where you can physically meet up to attend the conference. The two keynote presentations and panel session will be streamed to all venues. Additional sessions will be run at each local venue.

If there is no physical location near you, you can join remotely and view the streamed sessions from wherever you are. We will also have the OSGeo:UK Matrix room to allow people to chat to each other before, during and after the event.

If you are interested in volunteering at one of the venues below, please get in touch via our mailing list, our Matrix Chat Room or .

We are adopting a similar structure to last year, with the keynotes and panel discussion streamed to all venues and to YouTube.

Venues

We have eight venues:

You can also watch online if you wish, however the best experience will be in person. You are welcome to chat to other participants in the OSGeo:UK & FOSS4G:UK Matrix Room.

Keynotes

We have two amazing keynotes: Ujaval Gandhi and Helen McKenzie.

Helen McKenzie, Geospatial Advocate at CARTO: Getting People Excited about Geo! (09:45, streamed live to all venues and online)

Slides YouTube Helen will share her experiences on how to get non-geospatial professionals excited about geo! Whether you need a project timeline extension, promotion or needing a new hire - communicating the value of GIS is one of the most important soft skills needed in our industry. In this session, hear effective strategies for promoting the value of geospatial, such as emphasizing practical outcomes and commercial benefits.

Ujaval Gandhi, Educator | Founder @ Spatial Thoughts: Building a Career with Open-Source Technologies (14:45, streamed live to all venues and online)

Slides YouTube Ujaval will take you through the evolution of the geospatial industry through the past two decades with his personal journey from working at Google to starting his own academy focused on open-source technologies. You will get to hear how open-source technologies - GDAL, QGIS, and Python - played a key role in his career and helped solve complex geospatial problems and build data pipelines for processing petabytes of data. The talk will conclude by looking at emerging trends and how to prepare oneself to thrive in the current environment.

Ten Years After

We will also have the Ten Years After panel discussion to mark ten years since FOSS4G 2013 in Nottingham, themed around “Where have we gone in the last ten years, and where will be in ten years time?”.

Registration

Registration is now open! Book early to bag your place - last year almost all venues sold out. Additionally, refunds are available from Eventbrite (less a service fee) up to seven days before the event.

After much discussion, we have decided to charge a nominal fee of £20 for a ticket to attend. This is not a decision we have taken lightly, and is primarily due to a high rate of no-shows at some venues last year (up to 40%, see lessons learned from 2022 for more details). No-shows prevent others who would like to attend from attending and we end up over ordering on catering and wasting food.

We want FOSS4G:UK Local 2023 to be as accessible as possible, so we have a number of codes available for free tickets. These are available for students, under represented groups, those on a low income, those in precarious employment, those who would like to volunteer and anyone else for whom a £20 ticket would be a barrier (financial or administrative). All of these criteria are self-defined. We very much encourage you to reach out to to ask for a code, stating which group you belong to (no further justification is needed).

Any surplus made from the tickets will join any surplus from the sponsorship and conference as a whole, and be used to allow OSGeo:UK to provide financial support to open source geospatial projects (for example see Past Donations to see how we have supported open source geospatial project previously).

Join our our mailing list to keep up to date with news.

T-Shirts

Official T-Shirts are now on sale from T Shirt Studio at cost price plus P+P.

FOSS4G:UK Local 2023 t-shirt FOSS4G:UK Local 2023 t-shirt

Code of Conduct

Participants at FOSS4G:UK Local 2023 are expected to act respectfully toward others in accordance with the FOSS4G:UK Online Code of Conduct. Short version: everyone is welcome, make everyone welcome, be nice.

OSGeo UK Local Chapter