WhereCampEU 2011

WhereCampEU is by far the coolest geo event I know of. I attendet the first WhereCampEU last year in London, which was really fantastic, and this WhereCampEU in Berlin was in my perception even better! The event was awesomely well organized. The venue was perfect, located in one of the coolest neighborhoods of Berlin (Prenzlauer Berg), in the GLS Sprachenschule, a well renovated "Grüderzeitliches" (late 19th century or early 20th century) building I would guess. The sponsored lunch also was of really good quality, never had better food at an conference lunch even the most so called Gala Dinner menues on other conferences would have to hide behind this. ;)

It was a great gathering of a healthy good mixture of different kind of people, who have one thing in common, doing geo applications and beeing geogeeks or geonerds at least in some sense. The crowd was composed of high level technical and strategy people from large companys like Google, Nokia or Yahoo, guys running small to medium geo startups/shops, of course a good count of devs and hackers, the OpenStreetMap folks and also some significant count of acedemia was present. And this is what it makes so great, you have all the different perspectives on the discussed topics from people who truly knwo what they are talking about seen from their backgrounds. Just bring up an Idea and get instantly feedback from all those educated perspectives, this is what it makes so valuable and inspirational. The athmosphere was also just great, at no time I felt I was on some "proffesional/work" event. I just felt like being on some cultural/arts event with likeminded people. You know what I mean? There are those conferences where the athmosphere is really formal, nobody seems to enjoy their time on those events and it is not fun at all to attend to... WhereCampEU is fun! To get some good impressions of the event just look at the flickr Photostream:

.. or have a look at the #wceu hastag stream on twitter.

But after all this WhereCampEU fanboyism some words about the actual content of the great sessions we had. There was one pattern or topic on Open Data or Data integration going through the sessions. Regarding this it was multiply referred as to some sort of big data silos which are to be integrated. For example Ed Parsons was in his session on OpenData on the search for some "good app" to do this job, funny thing was, that the guy from Uberblic.com presented actually such an app an hour or two later. The app is for sure a very good Idea and has great potential to be successfull. Ed Parsons made a somewhat bold statement on twitter during the presentation of Uberblic...

This might be a good temporarily soloution for data integration, but in general I would strongly object that it is intelligent to build a business or any kind of additional technology which aims to be sustainable and usable for a "longer" time on some other proprietary "API", "silo", "directory", "catalog" or "hub". And Uberblic is nothing but proprietary "meta" silo for what I got about it from the session. What we need are (maybe) distributed and open silos/hubs/catalogs, which are well defined (yes sorry, an other word for this is "standardised") which every body can implement and use. And there is something around which is named SmeanticWeb, which actually does exactly concern this... But this short remark should be enough for this beautifull sunday (I might be doing a longer post on this topic soon).

Then there were a lot of interesting sessions presenting actual appplications, for example from the UCL CASA guys who showed the research going on at their lab, they have great things going on which really much impressed me. I also enjoyed the Yahoo! research demos, or the interessting session on geodatabses by @vmische and @sabman. Another great thing of such an event is to be able to get help with some software directly from the developer. In my case @oltonn the MapProxy core dev had a look on some configuration issues I had with setting up a local mapserver as source for a MapProxy cache, which could clear up all my questions directly. And then there was the presentation by @osebornec, who presentet absolutly gorgeous geo visualizations by ITO. And the best of this talk was, of course, to built in THE Alfred Korzybski remark "The map is not the territory"! :] That was just a great last presentation of WhereCampEU 2011 which kind of rounded it all up.

So, thanks goes out to the organizers of this great WhereCampEU 2011 @osebornec and @vicchi. I really enjoyed the whole Event and I'm absolutely looking forward to the next WhereCampEU!!