[OSGeo-Discuss] My experience at the FOSS4G 2018

[Rohith Reddy]

Hello all,

I am Rohith Reddy, an MS student at IIIT Hyderabad and a developer at
pgRouting. I attended the FOSS4G 2018 at Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. The main
conference was from 29 August - 31 August 2018. There were two main reasons
for me to attend the conference. The first reason was to present my
research work done at my university which was accepted at the conference.
The second reason was to represent pgRouting at the conference. In this
email, I would like to share what I did and the experiences I gained at the
FOSS4G 2018.


*Presented pgRouting at the OSGeo Annual General Meeting*

   - The OSGEO Annual General Meeting(AGM) was held on 30th August 2018
   from 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM.
   - In the meeting, an overall status of OSGeo was given along with a
   discussion on the future activities.
   - I talked about the status of the pgRouting project, where I mentioned the
   upcoming releases, student contributions and the support from the OSGeo
   community.
   - I had a chance to look at the ongoing developments in various OSGeo
   projects.
   - The meeting concluded with a report on the GSoC(2017-18) and GCI(2017).

*Presented pgRouting at the General Track of the conference*

   - The pgRouting presentation was initially scheduled for 30th August
   2018 from 4:30 PM - 5:00 PM.
   - I gave the presentation at the allotted time slot, but due to some
   confusion, there was a post on twitter saying the presentation was
   cancelled and was rescheduled to 31st August from 12:30 PM - 1:00 PM.
   - Though I gave the presentation on 30th August, I did not want to miss
   out on those who turned up for the presentation on 31st August. So, I
   decided to give the presentation again i.e on 31st August from 12:30 PM -
   1:00 PM.
   - When I went to give the presentation the second time, I was happy to
   see more people in the presentation room this time.
   - After the presentation, I met people who were interested to develop
   and use pgRouting. I was happy to discuss and clarify questions related to
   pgRouting that were asked by some of the audience.
   - Looks like the confusion turned out to be positive in this case :).


*Presented my research work at the academic track conference*

   - The presentation on my research work “Improving path query performance
   in pgRouting using a map generalization approach” was on 30th August 2018
   from 11:30 AM - 12:00 PM.
   - This was the first time I was presenting my work at an international
   conference. According to me, I presented better than what I expected and
   prepared.
   - After the presentation, some of the audience were interested in my
   work and we had discussions. This gave me a sense of satisfaction and
   motivated me to continue my research work.
   - In addition to this, I also received some suggestions and improvements
   from the audience which were really helpful. I cannot wait to try out those
   new ideas.


*Attended sessions and keynotes at the conference*

   - Throughout the conference, there were several parallel sessions. I
   attended many sessions which included sessions on GeoNode, QGIS, QField,
   PostGIS, Livewire, OSM, and Mapbox.
   - I was happy to see open source tools like LiveWire use pgRouting in
   their development. I attended the presentation of an academic work namely
   “Hierarchical path planning for walking (almost) anywhere” which also used
   pgRouting in their work.
   - I attended a session named “Fostering pre-university student
   participation in OSGEO through the Google Code-in Competition” by Jeff
   McKenna and Victoria. In this session, I was happy to congratulate the
   students of GCI and how the work done by GCI students at pgRouting was
   being used.
   - I had a chance to attend keynotes namely “Mapping to end FGM” and
   “Zanzibar Mapping Initiative”. I was excited to see the use of GIS and open
   source to solve real-world problems.


While attending the sessions I gained knowledge about various open source
GIS tools and their developments. In addition to this, I witnessed that
some open source tools use pgRouting which really motivates the pgRouting
team to develop and improve pgRouting. Unfortunately, I cannot attend the
FOSS4G community sprint due to my presentation at another conference in
Germany on 3 September 2018.

On the whole, attending the FOSS4G 2018 has been a great learning
experience and also gave me a chance to meet many people who were
passionate about open source GIS software. I am grateful to the FOSS4G
organising committee for providing me with the travel grant to attend the
conference and present my work. In addition to this, I thank the OSGeo
community and pgRouting for helping me to represent pgRouting at the
conference. I would also like thank Vicky Vergara and Daniel Kastl for
helping me prepare the presentations. A big shout out to the FOSS4G
organising committee for their massive efforts in organising such an
amazing conference :) !!!

Regards,
Rohith Reddy.
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