On 20th November this year we held the first PostGIS “Show-and-Tell” Day at the HQ of the British Computing Society. This was the first “official” OSGeo:UK event since hosting FOSS4G 2013 in Nottingham last year- it took us that long to recover from the stress!

We deliberately chose to make the event extremely light and informal, with the minimum of organisation, and this seemed to work pretty well. We had a range of speakers doing both longer talks and lightning talks, and then a session at the end where we discussed useful tools and add-ons for working with PostGIS.

The only caveats we placed on speakers were that the talk should (obviously) include PostGIS or PostgreSQL in some way, and that overt sales pitches would be considered uncool. Luckily our speakers obliged! There was also some really good audience interaction.

Highlights for me included Foreign Data Wrappers, for getting at information stored in other databases or behind other apis, but through PostgreSQL, and Raster processing. I was particularly excited by the Twitter FDW, but it turns out that it doesn’t work with the latest version of the twitter api, and it doesn’t look like a particularly well-maintained piece of code. You can see links to all the talks, and notes from the discussion that we had at the end, at our OSGeo:UK GitHub repository for the event: http://osgeouk.github.io/pgday/.

It transpired that there were a number of other events globally, also celebrating #PostGISDay, and perhaps next year it would be good to coordinate these better.

From an OSGeo:UK perspective, we have plans to hold more of these light-touch events, on a range of subjects (ideas gratefully received). Personally I would like to have charged a nominal fee for attending the event, not to make a profit but so that we could make a small donation back to PostGIS but charging money makes the whole process more complicated! We were extremely lucky in this case to get the venue for free, courtesy of the BCS Location Information Group, and to get the food sponsored by Astun Technology.

All in all, a really fun event, both to organise and to attend- thanks to all the speakers and attendees, and here’s to another event quite soon.