My FOSS4G 2017 List

Because I was asked.

We can't wait to see all the other goodies on your list! #foss4g https://t.co/RkNhQR3wkW

— FOSS4G 2017 (@foss4g) August 8, 2017

Here’s my 2017 FOSS4G list:

• Why We Code, the opening keynote, delivered by me. The least I can do is show up.
• Building the Capital Planning Platform: Leveraging Open Source Software to build data and mapping tools in Local Government, because I like tales about open source navigating the pitfalls of the public sector IT world, and because the presenter was a co-worker with me at Carto who I enjoyed a great deal.
• Protobuf based output formats for PostGIS, because these are new in PostGIS 2.4 and I haven’t read the commits, might as well get some info straight from the horse’s mouth.
• FOSS4G from the Trenches, because the belly of the GIS beast is the local government market, hearing how a practitioner has cracked that most uncrackable and conservative of audiences is very interesting.
• End-to-End Geo Machine Learning, because buzzwords! And because I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.
• A Journey through R for Geo, because R and statistics are “AI for the rest of us”, and I don’t know enough (anything) about spatial statistics.
• Best Practice for Serving Imagery using MapServer on Amazon Web Services, because S3/AWS is an under-appreciated solution for the “hosting a bunch of files as a tile service” problem, and the AWS solution gets better every year.
• Two laptops and a bag of thumb drives: knitting together a global community using FOSS4G, because I’ve gotten too far away from the on-the-ground aspect of how real users approach FOSS4G software. Too much time with the coder set gives one a skewed outlook.
• Trillions of points - spatial indexing, organization, and exploitation of massive point clouds, because I know pgpointcloud isn’t the answer, and I think something like this is.
• Accelerating geospatial analytics using Apache Spark, because buzzwords! And someone is promising to do actual spatial joins in a big data tool – bring it on!
• Free Software: Freedom, Privacy, Sovereignty, because Stallman.
• Processing Imagery from the World’s Largest Private Fleet of Satellites, because the Planet image processing chain is a wonder of the world, and I want to know more, more, more.
• CARTO’s spatial analytics extension, an update, because embarrassingly I don’t know much about the non-PostGIS analytics we expose in CARTO, and I want to hear Andy talk.
• Big Weather Data, all about partitions and precipitation, because weather was doing “big data” before it was a buzzword, using nothing but perl and cunning, I want to see what they are up to now.
• Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering, because even though the answer to gerrymandering is electoral reform, not redistricting, I retain an interest in how the “redistricting can be fixed” folks are attacking the impossible problem.

One week and I’ll be in Boston, looking forward to it!