Behind every great conference there are partners

Our Conference and our Partners

The Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) and State of the Map (SotM) Conference Oceania is very privileged to have some fantastic support from sponsors, partners, and our ‘parent’ international organisations. We would like to recognise and thank all of those organisations for helping us make this event happen.

It’s bigger than just us

Both FOSS4G and SotM are international. FOSS4G is a conference that has been running since 2006, and is hosted by OSGeo. OSGeo have given us permission to use this name, and are sponsoring the Community day. But more than that, OSGeo community has been very supportive of our event right from the very early stages when we were first discussing the possibility of running the event.

SotM is the international conference organised by the OpenStreetMap foundation, and they have graciously given us permission to use their name for our conference. The union of these two communities -- the software and the data -- means that we are able to bring together a diverse group of people, and hopefully we can provide feedback to each other and share our learnings.

We needed support… and we got it!

In a more local sense, we have two key partners than have enabled this conference.

Firstly, we are very lucky to have been provided the venue by the University of Melbourne’s ICA OSGeo Lab. We’re running our event in the Old Arts Building, which has recently been refurbished. There are a number of fantastic spaces for our workshops and community day and there are three large lecture spaces for presentations. The ICA OSGeo Lab is one of the mechanisms of the University's Spatial@Melbourne initiative, supported by multiple faculties, and which contributes to spatial information research, teaching and engagement. FOSS4G has a long and proud tradition at The University of Melbourne, and it’s great to have their support.

And last but not least, we are partnering with the Surveying and Spatial Sciences Institute, who are providing us with an organisational foundation and some administrative support. Since we are not a formal entity, we needed a partnership in order to send and receive funds, but more importantly, SSSI have been very supportive of our event and our committee. In addition to the organisational aspects, SSSI is keen to work with the open spatial community on our common goals of enhancing the profile of spatial professionals. We thank SSSI for supporting the open spatial community and for helping us to create this opportunity for collaboration.

Thank you!

And so, we are very thankful for all the above organisations and the people in them for helping us make this event a reality. But of course, we’re thankful for our sponsors, presenters, workshop hosts and the attendees who have all demonstrated support for this event, giving us the assurance that we’re doing something worth doing. So thank you, all of you, and we’ll see you in November.