The FOSS4G 2016 complete program is out!

The FOSS4G 2016 team is proud to present the full schedule of the biggest OSGeo annual global event! The Program Committee 2016 has been hard at work putting together in the best possible way the awesome 180 talks that were chosen, with your active help. Doing the impossible is not an easy task, so bear with us, small changes might occur. What impossible? The pleasing everyone kind.

As shaped by the OSGeo growing community, FOSS4G fosters a number of traditional subjects, such as web mapping development, community projects – GeoServer, MapServer, GRASS, PostGIS etc. - advancements, geoprocessing tools etc. As announced in our call for papers, this year, FOSS4G was set to build bridges towards communities with interests and works adjacent to ours. Thus, we have chosen 4 key stream: land information, open data, disaster management and Earth Observation. As expected, the conference program was built to offer a logical connection between talks and tracks, following the mentioned guidelines. The general construction for each conference day is of 7 tracks with an additional topic talk session.

FOSS4G 2016 will bring the community 7 keynote speakers, geospatial gurus sharing from their knowledge and experience. A quick look at our list of keynotes, will convince you that we have been true to our word, building bridges to take us all the way across communities and back. We will listen to Andreas Veispak, the Head of Unit for Space Data for Societal Challenges and Growth at the European Commission, Klaus Deininger, a Lead Economist at the Development Research Group of the World Bank investigating how advances in Earth Observation, computing power and connectivity could help reduce poverty, while Ton Zijlstra will initiate us in the complex world of Open data and what possible implications we can expect.

This year, the team is initiating a new kind of interaction, the topic talk. Within the conference days, the Lab will be the place to foster new ideas and encourage discussions around subjects such as: the intertwine between open source and open standards gently lead by Athina Trakas, Ingo Simonis from OGC or how to best couple land information and open source gently lead by Arnulf Christl from metaspatial and John Gitau from UN-Habitat - United Nations Human Settlements Programme. Markus Neteler from mundialis GmbH & Co and Christian Strobl from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) will engage in how open source and open data translates into the Copernicus Program.

Even more, in tune with the spirit of our community, we have prepared a special corner, the Speakers' Corner. Here, any FOSS4G participant is the absolute owner of 5 full minutes to share a project, to kindle an idea, to start a discussion to his audience. Of course, for informal lengthy talks the BoF is the place to go. Just pick a theme.

These are just glimpses of what FOSS4G 2016 has in store for you. It is time that, without any further ado, to kindly invite you to check the program and to map your own FOSS4G 2016 journey. http://2016.foss4g.org/programme.html#conference-programme