October is a busy time for spatial unconferences and meet-ups in the Boston area!
The folks at ISpatialBoston are hard at work organizing Boston’s first WhereCamp, which will be taking place October 29th and 30th at the Microsoft NERD office in Cambridge’s technology hub, Kendall Square . WhereCamp is an “unconference“, meaning that the attendees develop sessions based on what they are interested in. They have three keynote speakers lined-up and I’m sure there will be many interesting sessions that develop over the course of the weekend. Registration is open and it’s not too expensive. If you are in the area and are interested in “spatial” check out WhereCamp Boston. I’m looking forward to my first unconference. I can imagine that there will be a lot of open-source and crowdsourcing talk. I’m interested in finding out more on how to, if possible, validate crowd-sourced data in relation to the impacts of natural catastrophes.
The other upcoming spatial gathering is Esri’s Boston DevMeet-Up taking place on October 20th. The location is TBD, but last year’s Boston meet-up had about 50 to 60 people show-up and there were a few good talks. I even won an EDN license! The Esri DevMeet-Ups bring together Esri geospatial developers in an informal setting to talk shop. It is also a good time to meet other geospatial developers and pick their brains!
Unlike the weekend long WhereCamp, the Boston Esri DevMeet-Up is only for a couple hours on a weeknight where Esri provides the food and drinks. I hope there are some good talks. I’d be interested to see some code examples or talks about HTML5 integration, web-based spatial analytics, or interactive visualization methodologies for very large datasets.
Again, if you are in the area, check out these non-traditional spatial meetings. I know there are a ton of geospatial folks who can take public transit to these events. Hope to see all the locals there!