Last Thursday July 17^th, a large crowd of Geo-enthusiasts gathered at the Occidental Hotel in Sydney for a long overdue evening of GeoRabble, Beer & Pizza (thanks to Hexagon Geospatial).

We had a great, eclectic and diverse line-up of speakers, under the capable and entertaining management of MC for the night Francisco Urbina.

Two Andrews spoke on the topic of scanning and remote sensing, Umwelt’s Andrew Goodwin told us how LiDAR can be used beyond the traditional purposes of terrain- and flood modelling. Andrew’s team have instead use LiDAR to detect mallee-fowl mounds across expansive remote areas.

Andrew Harvey showed us a clever little trick he’d developed for obtaining easier access to Landsat 8 scenes using MapBox.

Moving to the other end of the spectrum, Colin Goudie and Charles Connell from Social Pin Point showed what you can do with online maps to encourage community engagement for planning purposes. They claim maps solicit up to 10 times more citizen feedback than traditional online surveys.

Engage2’s Amelia Loye expanded on the theme by exploring the different types of community engagement conversations, and how different mapping tools and –technologies support each one.

Geepers‘ David Whitfield is a serial entrepreneur, who broke the mould by using no media at all, and just having a conversation with the crowd. From a taxi driver  in China who couldn’t get his Satnav to work, to indoor navigation and private location sharing solutions such as Geepers, it was truly engaging.

To round the evening off, GeoRabble co-founder Maurits van der Vlugt from Mercury Project Solutions gave a speed lecture on the ‘art’ of Gerrymandering (the partisan redrawing of electoral boundaries) and how it brought a mighty country to a standstill, by causing the 2013 US government shutdown.

Thanks everyone for making this yet another great GeoRabble evening, we will see you all at our next event!