FOSS4G and Biodiversity International Year

I am not sure if there is enough people on the biodiversity informatics/conservation community that knows about the great conference on Open Source and GIS FOSS4G.

Most of us are already using great Open Source software for GIS. For example Geoserver, PostGIS, Quantum GIS,gvSIG, GRASS, OpenLayers, GDAL/OGR, MapServer and many more. This is the conference were all those developers meet. The conference include Workshops, tutorials and presentations. The level of the program is just amazing. Let me show you some of the ones of my own interest:

T-08: How to generate billions of tiles using distributed cloud-computing
T-11: Standardized geoprocessing with 52°north open source software
W-14: Practical introduction to GRASS
W-09: Quantum GIS and PostGIS: Solving spatial problems and creating web-based analysis tools

Or take a look at last year presentations to get excited on the great topics that are discussed on this conference.

So I really would like you to consider attending this great conference and participate on the Open Source movement on GIS.

But more important. In this International year on Biodiversity, I would like to get something organized around Biodiversity/Conservation and Open Source Geospatial software. I truly believe that GIS Open Source software is enabling the development of lot of our initiatives, and without it handling biodiversity knowledge would just be impossible.


The idea is to have enough people attending from this community to create a side event specific to biodiversity. Last year for example they created one event around interoperability of projects on Climate
Change. What about something similar for biodiversity?

The deadline for paper submissions and presentations is in 2 days, I know it is tight, and it would help me a lot to get support from the organizers if we get a decent submission on biodiversity/conservation
topics.

Considering that Biodiversity is deeply linked to Geospatial information I think it could be a great venue to push the requirements from our community into the development of Open Source GIS that most
of us are using anyway.

I have contacted organizers and they are willing to organize a side event for Biodiversity/Conservation, but they just need to know there is enough people interested on it.

I have sent multiple messages to different people and list that I know could be interested and I am getting already lot of answers of people that are gonna be submitting abstracts. I will try to collect all of them in this post so that we can see how the community will be represented.

Additionally if it is possible for you consider supporting the event as a sponsor or providing an official letter of support for the initiative.

Finally. We still need to decide what kind of event we will like to see there. Presentations, an interoperability test (like last year Climate Challenge Integration Plugfest)... we decide.

Looking forward to see lot of people from the community in Barcelona!