AGI2008: Shaping a Changing World, the UK’s largest dedicated event for the geographic information community, was held over 24-25th September 2008 in Stratford upon Avon.
This is the second fully residential AGI Geocommunity conference, bringing together over 600 delegates from various professional backgrounds including practitioners, academics, policy makers and suppliers.
The conference was dominated by talk of a changing world; a changing climate, changing perceptions but perhaps most importantly the changing role of GI (Geographic Information) with the increasing use of GI by ‘ordinary folk’ and its availability on the web.
Keynote speakers
The conference was opened with three key note speakers. First was Sean Phelan, Founder of Multimap, who made the point that “we will be the last generation to know what it feels like to get lost”. He gave an interesting presentation about the way in which his company has grown within the market, in light of what was happening around it.
Vanessa Lawrence, Director General and Chief Executive of Ordnance Survey, then presented. She alluded to the importance the government was placing on the ‘place’ agenda and also made, what I consider to be a very valid point; that we have need more evangelists of GI from the GI community. People need to sell the message about how the technology could, and should, be used.
Finally Geoff Zeiss, Director of Technology at of Autodesk, presented some up and coming technology being used by his company.
Presentation slides by the keynote speakers are available to download from the AGI website.
The rest of the day was spent attending presentations of the many papers that had been sent to conference. A ‘call for papers’ by AGI takes place earlier on in the year on any GI (or related) topic, the best or most relevant of these are asked to be presented at conference.
Papers this year ranged from Business Case 2.0: Measuring the Intangible Benefits of GIS to Using Open Source Database in a Housing Association and everything in-between. There was lots of choice with five papers being presented at a time. In addition there were practical workshops run by some of the sponsors.
That evening it was time to dust off the shells suits, dig out the leg warmers and let our hair down (if only the hair spray would allow it), for the 80s themed party. The West Midlands pulled out all the stops with Claire Edwards (Natural England) and Shona Frost (Staffordshire County Council) looking like they had stepped straight out of the 1980s with their aluminous leg warmers and matching necklaces. In addition someone (who will remain nameless) managed an impressive 50 seconds of the Bucking Bronco, egged on by her fellow West Midlands representatives.
Second day
Up again bright and early for the morning plenary session including presentations from Charlie Patterson of the Environment Agency, Stuart Haynes of Defence Geographic Centre and Charles Kennelly of ESRI.
More papers presented that afternoon including Understanding ‘Places’- Innovative Frameworks for Sharing GI and Looking towards Crowd-Sourced Solution.
The presentation for the Best Papers were awarded that afternoon. This included a new award of the “Delegates Vote for Best Conference Paper”. The awards were given as follows:
Delegates' Vote for Best Conference Paper: The Hype of the Web 2.0 by Mark Bishop.
The Overall Best Paper at GeoCommunity ’08 was by James Brayshaw, Atlantis Initiative (The Atlantis Initiative – Priorities following the Pitt Review). The paper by Muki Haklay, UCL (Usability and GIS – why your Boss should buy you a larger monitor) was highly commended.
To round up, Chair of the AGI, Steven Feldman, spoke of dialogues opening up between different parts of the community, and by doing this we were starting to build the GI Community. Indeed there was a notable increase in the number of academics and researchers presenting at conference; no bad thing in my opinion.
Looking forward
So what will be the theme running through the conference next year?
According to Steven Feldman it will be “sense of place”; something that is very much part of government agenda. He ended by stating that the only barrier to developing technology was our imaginations and not the technology itself, so it looks like it is up to us to get those creative juices flowing and continue to use GI in new and innovative ways.