The official whereCampEU review
2012 May 4
It is a rather silly title of this blogpost, but then again, there was some serious silliness involved at whereCampEU. There wasn’t much official about whereCampEU anyway and the difference with GeoSpatial World Forum certainly could not have been greater (I will get back to that in a column for Directions Magazine).
I found reviews of whereCampEU by Christian and Puntofisso (great pictures as well!), which looks very complete. Did I miss others? A few of my observations:
Mix of people
A great mix of whereCampers present. If categorising is a necessity: openstreetmappers, academics, start-ups, open source developers, corpereteers (intrapreneurs) or a mix of the above. Really enjoyed conversations about where OpenStreetMap is heading, how this influences spatial learning (cognition), what meeting up will mean in a few years time, etc.
Expecting the unexpected
I hope the program delivered some of the “expect the unexpected” promise we made. Unexpected to me were Tim Waters (who’s presentation I missed, but it found its way to slideshare ‘s frontpage!), Laurence Penny (@lorp) on one-dimensional maps (showed Google’s StreetView from over a century ago) and Roman routing by René Voorburg of http://omnesviae.org/ (wish we had a omnesmarae as well!).
Hallway conversations
For me, the hallway conversations about monetizing (…), what is open and what is closed (the dichotomy of openness? – I am into open innovation..) and connecting to the Esri ecosystem were really nice (so thank you!)
My two cents contribution to the (non-existant) organising committee of whereCampEU were on the communication side of whereCamp (blogs and tweets), apart from nagging Henk often enough to get going. Next international event in the Netherlands is the International Open Source GIS Conference in Arnhem (well, very nearby). Hope to see you there!
View more presentations from Jan Willem van Eck
Dugg up my own one-dimensional map from 1979, apparently barely passed that early navigation exam. Personal note: since it was weekend, I even presented with my boots on. Should do that more often.
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