FortiusOne at WhereCampSoCal this Weekend

This weekend I’m off to San Diego for WhereCampSoCal. WhereCamps are a version of barcamps or unconferences specifically around geospatial topics. An unconference is an event where the agenda is determined in an ad-hoc fashion by the attendees. This is usually done the day of the event utilizing a grid scheduling system sometimes referred to as “the board.” There are slight variations on how the board is created, but usually people write ideas on a piece of paper and then announce them to the group and place the topic on the grid. Sometimes similar topics are combined but that is up to the proposers of each topic. Usually people are fairly agreeable to joining forcing to run sessions.

The one thing that is atypical of this WhereCamp is that it is not entirely an unconference. The first day there are scheduled sessions and keynotes. Friend of FortiusOne, Todd Huffman is keynoting as well as Eric Frost from San Diego State University Viz Center. I’ll be giving two workshops, the first on using GeoCommons to share data and make custom maps. The second workshop is on how to edit in OpenStreetMap. There are also going to be workshops from SimpleGeo, ESRI and Urban Mapping. While the structured portion of the event is going on during the day Saturday there will also be unconference sessions. Sunday sessions are all ad-hoc and will be proposed the day of the event. I hope to participate in a session on geolocative games, which is one of my favorite topics at most WhereCamps. Some people from Grassroots Mapping will be around, so I hope to help fly some kites and balloons to take aerial photography as well.

Since WhereCamps are usually free to the attendees I was excited that FortiusOne was able to sponsor the event. Without sponsors it would be impossible to keep these events free. The cost of running an ad-hoc event is relatively cheap, but there are still expenses for food and office materials to make the grid for example.

Registration is still open for WhereCampSoCal up until almost the start of the event. So if this sounds fun to you sign-up and I’ll see you there!