FOSS4G conferences have a tradition of hosting a community day/code sprint after the conference. State of the Map conferences have similar traditions, often including an OpenStreetMap mapathon. Our community day is open to everyone from novice to expert. It is a melting pot of ideas where project insiders meet users and each helps the other. There's always plenty to do – it's not only about programming and/or street-mapping.
The Community Day will be held Friday 15th of November at Rutherford House (corner of Lambton Quay and Bunny Street), part of Victoria University of Wellington, which is only a few minutes walk away from the main conference location. We will be starting at 9am and finishing at 5pm, with catering provided.
Registration at the conference is not a prerequisite for participation in the Community Day. Participation in the Community Day is free of charge and all folks interested in giving back to geospatial open source and open data communities are welcome.
The Community Day is a free, informal event led by participants with shared interests in a particular topic. The emphasis of the day is to give inspired individuals a chance to meet and share their open geospatial knowledge, such as sharing code, troubleshooting problems, or helping beginners tackle problems they have encountered.
Workshops are structured events led by one or more instructors to learn specific tasks or to teach specific skills. Workshops require registration and cost $100 per half day. There is a limited number of places for each workshop.
If you are interested in leading a community day event, send us an email with your thoughts to community@foss4g-oceania.org.
Keith Moss
This is about brainstorming what needs to go into a pack/book/resource that would allow motivated people to run smaller FOSS4G conferences in their cities in between the major annual conference. What if the organiser had no previous experience of running a FOSS4G conference and has to start from scratch?
If successful, this lets FOSS4G reach a broader audience without turning the annual conference into something that becomes unmanageable and allows local conferences to focus on specific local issues and themes.
Here, we need to consider the dependencies, such as the application process; criteria are for letting people use the brand; funding caps/limits/milestones; and a pile of other things.
Ivan Majic
The organiser needs your help with reviewing some automatically detected errors in OSM! The two specific cases of potential errors that have been detected are:
- bridges that are not connected to other objects on both sides (they don't lead anywhere), or are not crossing any obstacles; and
- buildings that are not accessible from the surrounding roads.
We would also love to have a discussion on automated processes in OSM and mapping. How can we use data mining, machine learning, and AI to improve our maps? Can we trust these automated processes and do they always need to be approved by human experts? Can the government/industry resources be helpful in developing such tools, and what form of their involvement would be effective? We would love to hear your thoughts on these issues so please join us in this activity!
Alexander Herzig
This session might be a good opportunity for all developers, who are working on new but yet not widely known FOSS4G, to showcase their projects that aspire to become an OSGeo project one day. Alexander Herzig will start the discussion through a show and tell of his software with his aim of building a community around it. This is a room where new projects could be presented in a free-flowing discussion.
Harsh Govind
The Microsoft Open Maps team has been focused to empower Bing, Microsoft's search engine, for all its geospatial requirements in AU on OSM. We take signals from imagery, government data and other openly available datasets with compatible licensing and in-collaboration with OSM and its local communities make necessary add/edits/updates to OSM.
There is an evident gap between OSM and other competitors when it comes to different geospatial features e.g. roads. Although we have government ground truth data which can be a good starting point and then combine that with other signals, still, sometimes it is hard to identify the problematic areas and to set up the environment where one can easily add things that are missing on the map.
In our discussion with the community, we want to share what we have learnt, our wins and challenges as we continue on this journey. Get input on best practices around keeping data fresh/updated and the steps we want to take together to keep the OSM community vibrant and engaging. This will be an opportunity to talk about tools and we will be ready to demonstrate how we recognize gaps using QGIS, how we use Tasking Manager and MapRoulette to fill these differences, and why we use GeoServer — some of the questions we have been asked. Bring in your ideas for an open discussion.
Wei Ji Leong
Whether you're a student learning to code or a seasoned Python GIS developer, there inevitably comes a time when you spot a typo in the documentation, some missing feature or an annoying bug you want solved. We're looking for just about anyone ready to dip their toes into the community developed PyGMT project. This session aims to gently guide you through your first open source contribution, from setting up the required software on your computer, to running tests that ensures everything works, and finally publishing your changes online on GitHub!
PyGMT is a user-friendly Python wrapper around the powerful Generic Mapping Tools library used by geo-scientists all over the world. Being a young but active open source project means it's easier to create something significant and get feedback in a short amount of time. Come along and we'll get you started in no time!
David Garcia
We will support and host a mapathon and discussion for Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and other Pacific islands. With the participants, we'd like to help achieve three goals:
- Promote accountability to the local community by properly contextualising the project and coordinating with the proponents of the particular Missing Maps task.
- Support local leaders in leading the mapathon.
- Encourage more volunteers to contribute quality data to the project by thoughtfully tracing basic features like buildings and roads.