Hi Oceania folks First, apologies to anyone on the main OSGeo discussion email list for this double post. I sent it there accidentally! On to the topic:
It's likely that everyone in the community is aware now that there are two geospatial conferences scheduled in Oceania at the same time this year! One is the Pacific Geospatial Conference [1] - a collaboration between OSGeo Oceania, the Pacific GIS and Remote Sensing Council. This will be hosted in Suva, Fiji. The second is the Oceania Geospatial Symposium [2] - an event supported by GEO[2] and hosted in Noumea, New Caledonia. A few people saw this second one turn up on linkedin recently. With my OSGeo director hat on I reached out to Emma Luke - who posted the notice and is cc'ed here - for a chat about how we managed to get two events on the same week in the same region. The best answer is, its complicated and there are no bad vibes intended. I think the most relevant message for the OSGeo Oceania community is to embrace both events. It will be great to see the open source geospatial community and OSGeo Oceania visible in both places, and I hope that is how the news of two events in the same time slot is generally being received. Other questions which popped up are: - are either conference hybrid format? - are talks being live streamed? Both would really help for people who want to multi-conference if they can! A potentially really cool idea would be cross-broadcasting between events, maybe that is a bridge too far - but if we never ask the question, nothing ever happens. Back to immediate practicality - I think the best approach is to encourage everyone to choose the event where they think they will have the most impact, I think there is a large enough community for both to succeed! Maybe people just do this anyway - if so, great! I think it is also great to have this discussion out in the open and on the record. In the long term, we can get more coordinated. it also came to light that OSGeo Oceania could use some profile raising in GEO's regional networks. We discussed getting an OSGeo Oceania representative along to an Asia-Oceania GEO [4] virtual meeting in September to deliver a 'what is OSGeo Oceania' talk - to me that sounds like a great idea, perhaps it should be someone from the OO board, but really it could be anyone who has the time and interest. Cheers, Adam --- [1] https://osgeo-oceania.org/pacific-geospatial-conference/ [2] https://oceania-geospatial.com/ [3] https://www.earthobservations.org/index.php [4] https://aogeo.net/en/ _______________________________________________ Oceania mailing list Oceania@lists.osgeo.org https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/oceania