It was announced on July 10, 2012 by the FOSS4G local organizing committee that the FOSS4G 2012 conference that was scheduled to be held in September in Beijing has been cancelled. The OSGeo board was of course disappointed to hear this. Like anyone who follows the OSGeo conference or board public mailing lists we have known for some time that the local committee was facing various challenges. But we wanted to give the local team the maximum chance to try to pull together an event.
FOSS4G has been successful being a truly global conference, taking a major event around the world with most of the work done by local volunteers. We’ve had great success with this approach, with excellent events in cities including Sydney and Cape Town – but this approach also has its risks. We will look carefully into what we can learn from this year to mitigate the risk in future.
Despite this setback, the FOSS4G event has continued to expand around the globe this year: The global FOSS4G 2011 event in Denver was the largest yet, with 900 people from 42 countries and great reviews from attendees. Plans for FOSS4G 2013 in Nottingham are already very advanced with a very strong team which will beyond any doubt organize a great event.
FOSS4G has also evolved into multiple regional events in addition to the global one. We already had several successful regional FOSS4G events this year; one for North America in Washington DC, one for Central and Eastern Europe in Prague and FOSS4G Japan will take place in November. Many regional geospatial conferences now also include a strong OSGeo or FOSS4G steam. As an example find a list of events where OSGeo Live was distributed:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_History
OSGeo normally presents the Sol Katz award at the annual FOSS4G conference, to recognize an individual as a leader in the geospatial Open Source community. The Sol Katz award will also be awarded this year, but it is still to be determined how, when and where the presentation will take place. The same applies for the OSGeo Annual General Meeting which will be rescheduled in due course, several options are already on the table.
With kind regards,
the OSGeo Board of Directors
