A couple of weeks ago was the OSGIS 2010 conference at the Centre for Geospatial Sciences at the University of Nottingham. This was expanded on the previous year’s event- it was spread over 2 days with workshops on the first day and the conference on the second. We also held the 2nd AGM of the UK OSGeo local chapter after the conference (a shameless attempt to get as many people as possible to attend).

The workshops went well- I reprised my “Databases and Web Mapping the Open Source way” workshop using the OSGeo Live DVD in the process. If you last tried Live DVDs a few years ago and think they are going to be unworkably slow and clunky then think again. The Live DVD team have done a very good job with the OSGeo version too!

As is usually the case when you’re involved in running an event, my memory of the actual papers on day two is somewhat hazy. Stand-out themes were TinyOWS and GvSIG in my book. The GvSIG team in particular were there in force, and very impressive.

The local chapter AGM went well, although I’ve committed my first mistake in calling it the local chapter, as we decided that was a bit too hells-angels, so we’re now called OSGeo:UK (branding updates to follow). Perhaps due to my (even more) shameless emotional blackmail in my introductory talk, there was a lot of new interest. We now have a mailing list of over 100 people for a start. The mailing list is actually the best place to go for my quick round-up of the AGM- check out the archive for more details. In particular though, if you are involved in promoting any workshops using open source software and you want some publicity then get in touch as we want to get a good list together of all the events that are taking place in the UK.

I followed up events in Nottingham with assisting at another two-day workshop in Leicester, at which I repeated my “databases and web mapping…” talk yet again, alongside talks on spatial statistics with R, and QGIS/GRASS. My talks for all these events are up on slideshare if you’re interested, and will follow in the downloads section of this website when time permits.