Yesterday was the first official day of AGI Geocommunity 2010 (second for those that attended the W3G unconference the day before).

A lot has happened in the UK Geospatial Industry since last year- when one of my highlights was Ed Parsons talking about the ludicrous situation of data ownership in the Ordnance Survey. Now, we have lots of free data to play with, and indeed one of the over-riding themes yesterday was how we use this data properly. The poor old Asborometer was highlighted not once but twice as an example of what we shouldn't be doing.

Recession has clearly focussed people's minds- there was a lot less worrying about "palaeo" and "neo" in the sessions I went to, and a lot more worrying about raising our game and increasing the profile of GIS across the public sector and in business. We all know how useful GIS is, and how it can improve efficiency and save costs, but we have to convince others of that fact too. We do, however, need to focus on solutions to problems rather than the technology itself.

Of the keynote speeches my personal favourite was from Andy Hudson-Smith of CASA, maker of Talesofthings and MapTube. Anyone who's mantra is still "wouldn't it be great if..." amongst all the doom and gloom and budget cuts is alright with me.

Steven Feldman's paper on Cocktails on the Titanic presented open, free, and the cloud as the proverbial icebergs that traditional GIS vendors need to steer round or crash into. Personally I'd prefer a life-raft analogy, but it was good to hear open source and data being highlighted in this way.

Lunch time saw an informal get together of OSGeo:UK, developments around which are worthy of a blog post on their own asap!

Matthew Perrin of Envitia presented a great paper on the use of open source software and open standards at the Welsh Assembly Government. This is an example of open source and proprietary solutions working well together- it doesn't have to be an all or nothing approach.

Gary Gale talked about silos of geodata being collected by, for example, foursquare, facebook and gowalla, in an entertaining talk about the four horsemen of the geocalypse. There are attempts to create global, open, databases of places- like Geonames, so perhaps what we now need to see is the big players rallying around these existing efforts rather than re-inventing the wheel...

I talked about the opportunities that have grown from the transition to open source at Oxford Archaeology- slides and my paper will appear on slideshare asap. The usual questions about "risk" and "costs" came up- so I think there's room for a blog post on those points fairly soon too!

The last session I attended was a panel on the AGI's Foresight study that I contributed to last year. The discussion did dwell a little on issues of open data and transparency- reinforcing my feeling that this is the key point people are concerned about this year.

Roll on day two...

The second day of the conference was great as always, book-ended by an
interesting keynote from Michael Gould of ESRI and the now infamous
WMS shoot-out, complete with glitter vest and song, so I'm told!
Michael Gould's speech on fostering greater collaboration between open
developers and ESRI has been widley reported on, but personally I
think he made an incorrect assumption early on, and missed the point.
He assumed that everyone is doing what they do to make money, and this
is probably the one conference where that is simply not true. People
work with, and use, open source software for many other reasons
besides money (although that helps) and lowering the financial
barriers to entry in EDN isn't a massive incentive in this
environment. There was much talk of "open", but with a very limited
definition of that term.

Ironically this was followed by Ivan Sanchez and his talk on game
theory and its application in software development- in which he
"proved" that the only way to "win" is to share, and then Helena
Mitasova's keynote on open source software in academia.

Proprietary software is often thought of as "necessary" for a career
in "industry" and of course pretty much free to academic institutions,
so tends to dominate. However increasingly students need more choice,
even if it's just so they can install a copy of the software on their
laptop.  Helena listed a number of institutions teaching open source
GIS, sometimes alongside proprietary GIS but called out for more
collaboration in preparing modules in areas other than desktop GIS.
More information is available on the OSGeo wiki.

I divided the afternoon between Postgis and Inspire- related talks,
and learnt a lot, particularly about Inspire. Open source
implementations are starting to be developed, which the UK could learn
from and contribute to.

Finally an honourable mention to the OpenStreetMap map-in-a-box
project (it's law that there has to be at least one OSM talk). This
takes the pain out of deploying your own instance of OSM data and
keeping it up to date. Sounds fun, and I'll be keeping an eye on it.

The Gala Dinner was a triumph- good food, wine and conversation. Many
late arrivals and bleary eyes this morning!

So... the tribes have gathered again. For me it's the first time since 2007 in Victoria, and it's interesting to see the changes. 800+ people have made it to Barcelona this year, despite the global recession. I think there's a different mix this year- more women (always a minority but sometimes more than others), and a couple more sharp suits, but these are non-empirical trite statements so we'll move on.

Having not attended and workshops this year, the plenary sessions were my first intro to the conference. Schuyler Earle inspired us and flattered us all by saying that, by developing the software behind Openstreetmap, used in Haiti and elsewhere for humanitarian crisis mapping, we have all helped save lives. Then he said he expects this to continue, so we'd better get on with it!

Arnulf Cristl made us think about the metaphysical side of what we do, taking in such concepts as the definition of the world, and space. It's good to start with something high level to get those brain cells working!

With Miguel Montesinos of Prodevelop doing both a plenary speech, and sessions on GvSIG mobile, there ws plenty of GvSIG love to be had. Developments in GvSIG mobile suggest that's well deserved- with a new interface and better integration with the desktop version as well as editing functionality and other goodies. It's clearly being pitted against Arcpad, and tests seem to suggest it has the functionality and speed to be a worthwhile competitor, on windows mobile at least.

Sophia Parafina of OpenGeo did a good round-up of the options available for open source mobile augmented reality- I think "Promising but not there yet" sums that up, but there are a few things like Mixare to keep an eye on and she gets bonus points for including a picture of a unicorn.

Now who wants tapas?

FOSS4G in Barcelona is only a few days away now, and I'm getting very
excited. The programme looks great! As an experiment (and due to
Easyjet's baggage policy) I'm going to try and manage with just my
smartphone and my ipod- no laptop. This is a test post using posterous
to see how feasible that is, and to wish Archaeogeek.com a happy 4th
birthday. How time flies...

I hope to catch up with loads of my geo-pals in sunny Barcelona!