[OSGeo-Discuss] Two conferences, two opportunities

[Adam Steer]

Hi Oceania folks

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
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[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/