GeoCat was happy to attend FOSS4G 2024 in Belém Brazil and help support the open source community in this outreach event.
Welcome to Belém
The Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference is held in a different location each year. The event is organized by the Open Source Geospatial (OSGeo) foundation, which selected a proposal for the city of Belém in northern Brazil.
The event was held in a repurposed airport hanger providing lots of room for everyone to stretch out. We enjoyed the rich food, music, and dancing, as activities were hosted in different venues around the city.
At the main conference centre, GeoCat really enjoyed our booth location, the warm welcome, and the opportunity to catch up with everyone. It was a great experience to introduce both our company and our products to so many wonderful people.
Workshops and Presentations
Presentations at FOSS4G are a great chance to catch up with the different projects and learn first hand from the teams doing the work. Jody and Jeroen were busy with workshops and presentations throughout the week.
Thanks to Gabriel Roldan for assisting with the GeoServer workshop and State of GeoServer presentation. He was also attending the event to promote the excellent Cloud Native GeoServer project and the recent work done on OGC API Features support.
Jody teamed up with Ivan Sanchez to talk about some of the recent security challenges with Cyber Resilience Act and CVE-2024-36401 that have been disruptive in 2024.
We also had an overview of OGC API progress with ogcapi-records and ogcapi-features development. This is an interesting talk looking ahead to the transition to REST+JSON services, and some of the roadmap plans for both GeoNetwork 5 and GeoServer 3.
While we anticipated catching up with Fernando Quadro from the local GeoServer community, unfortunately he could not attend. Thankfully, he was able to send along a “GeoServer in Brazil” presentation which we made use of from the GeoCat booth.
Here are some of the highlights:
- Approaching Security with Kindness and Compassion
- Developer Stories
- Exploring OGCAPI
- Getting Started with GeoServer (workshop)
- GeoServer in Brazil
- State of GeoServer 2.26.1
- State of GeoTools and Friends
Open Source Geospatial Foundation
Jeroen had a busy week with OSGeo board meetings, pulling together ideas, proposals and budget for 2025.
The OSGeo Anual General Meeting was slotted in at the end of the conference after the closing ceremony. This was an opportunity to congratulate pgRouting on joining the OSGeo family, and share our plans for GeoNetwork 5.
While updates about the individual projects were cut short, there was a dynamic Q&A afterwards, diving into to some of the challenges ahead which will feed into planning for 2025.
We also enjoyed doing a bit of outreach and advocacy at the OSGeo booth conveniently located next to ours during the conference.
Obrigado (thank you)!
Thank you to the local organizing committee and everyone in Brazil for your hospitality.
Thank you also to the GeoCat Family and our customers. Best of the holiday season to one and all.
