Category Archives: Blog

Blog, Sydney

Program for GeoRabble Sydney & Prizes to be won – Don’t forget to register!

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We are proud to announce a great line-up of speakers for GeoRabble Sydney, Thursday 30 April, from 6PM at the Occidental Hotel:
  • Krissie Auld (Office of the Environment and Heritage) – “Open OEH”
  • Maurits van der Vlugt (Mercury Project Solutions)- “Mythbusters: what makes data Authoritative?”
  • Warren Gardiner (Council of Social Services of NSW) – “An Open Data Journey from PDF to web maps”
  • Francisco Urbina (Esri Australia) – “Location Intelligence in NSW”
  • Paul Farrell (NGIS Australia)
  • Damian Carroll (Airbus) – “An Open Access Imagery Licence – the NZ Experience”

 

Also, there will be a ‘StreetView guessing game’, with great prizes!

Remember: GeoRabble is free to attend, as is the Pizza, courtesy of Pitney Bowes, who are sponsoring this event!pb-logo-TM-web

Don’t forget to register here, or join our Meetup group.

Blog, Sydney

First Speaker confirmed for GeoRabble Sydney and Invitation to Rabblers for your stories

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Our first GeoRabble Sydney for 2015 is all systems go with registration coming in fast.

It is a great sign that the topic of Open GeoSpatial Data is something that resonates with many of us and impacts the work that we do.

Which why it is great that we have Krissie Auld from the Office of Environment and Heritage talking about ‘Open OEH’ and with OEH being such a huge generator and custodian of spatial data it will be great to hear about their efforts.

We are confirming more speakers but still have room for a few more, so if you have a story on the success, uses, failure, frustrations or just want to highlight your dramas with trying to get access to open geospatial data, this is the forum for you.

Submit your short description to sydney@georabble.org and remember that your presentation is  limited to 10 minutes to make sure the heart of your message is delivered

Don’t forget to register here, or join our Meetup group!

If you just want to share your story on the use of geo in your day to day experience feel free to submit as well as we are always looking for fun, interesting and surprising geo related presentations

Looking forward to sharing a great night with you all.

Blog, Sydney

Here comes the 1st GeoRabble Sydney of 2015!! Call for speakers!

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Thursday 30th of April – Save the date!!

source: http://www.uitp.org/action-points-benefits-open-data

We are happy to announce that our 1st GeoRabble Sydney event for the year 2015, will be held at the Occidental Hotel, on the 30th of April, at 6:00pm! We are very excited to see you again, to hear your new stories and new experiences and share the knowledge in a relaxed and pleasant environment, full of Geo-enthusiasts!

There is always a call for speakers and for this event we would like to explore: “Uses and Users of Open Geo-Spatial Data”.

So, do you use open geo-spatial data? What are you using it for? Where can you find it? Do you have any tricks or tips?

Submit your short description to sydney@georabble.org. Talks are limited to 10 minutes.

Registrations are now open: register here, or join our Meetup group!

Blog

Presenters @ Georabble Brisbane #6

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We are excited to announce our confirmed speakers for Georabble Brisbane #6 :

  • Rob Clout – Its a surprise!
  • Chris McAlister – Hooray for Geodesy aka GeoBabble
  • Peter Todd – Hooray for Geodesy aka GeoBabble
  • David Sapparth – Enterprise GIS Nirvana
  • Helen Moon – Queensland Valuation Globe – A sneak preview

Our host for the evening and sure to be a very charismatic master of ceremonies will be the well loved and hugely respected Mr Michael Krome.

Grab yourself a free ticket and enjoy the night with friends sharing geospatial ideas, free of sales pitches and hidden agendas!  Each presentation is light, relevant to geo-something and only 10 minutes long.

We would like to thank our good friends at Mipela GeoSolutions. Mipela have been amazing supporters of Georabble from the beginning, so we are very grateful that they have helped us out yet again!

http://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/the-return-of-georabble-brisbane-locate15-special-tickets-15871208211

We look forward to seeing you all at the Pig and Whistle on Tuesday 10th of March for another evening of spatial fun!

Blog

The Return of Georabble Brisbane!

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The rumours were true, after a long absence, finally the fun filled evening that is GeoRabble Brisbane returns.

A special event to coincide with Locate 15 and to welcome visitors to our fair city and to provide a well needed evening of entertainment following the conference welcome reception and open day.

Please join us to show all our visitors from all over Australia and from all over the world how we have fun in Brisbane.

We will return to our spiritual home at the Pig and Whistle for another evening of spatial fun.

We are delighted to once again have sponsorship from our good friends at Mipela GeoSolutions. Mipela have been amazing supporters of Georabble from the beginning, so we are very grateful that they have helped us out at short notice to sponsor this evening of spatial goodness 

http://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/the-return-of-georabble-brisbane-locate15-special-tickets-15871208211

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Blog, Sydney

GeoRabble Sydney, 10 December: Talks, Pizza, Jobseeker Pitchfest

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GeoRabble Sydney is back, and we are happy to announce our first set of speakers!Hexagon Geospatial

Join us Wednesday 10 December at the Paragon Hotel (Velvet Lounge) in Sydney’s CBD from 5:30 PM for Classic GeoRabble talks, a Jobseeker Pitchfest (more about that below), and of course our famous free Pizza (courtesy of Hexagon Geospatial)! GeoRabble is free, to be there, join our Meetup group, or register here.

The final Speaker Line-up is:

Maria Xygkaki
  • Daniel Kruimel –  “Every Cloud has a Spatial Lining”
  • Jayson Ward  – “Oz Spotting: Media Arts and Mobile”
  • Alex Cowdery – “Spatial marketing, which company am I”, an interactive Game for all.
  • James Shepherd – “Needle in a Hakea stack: locating Aboriginal rock shelter sites in dense vegetation”
  • Rebecca Paget & David James – “Reinventing Neighbourhoods through Hyperlocal Technology & Babysitting”
  • Maria Xygkaki – “Santa uses GIS: Spatial Analysis for the gift distribution”
Daniel Kruimel

New to this event is our Jobseeker Pitchfest: where people looking for (new) opportunities have 3 minutes to get on stage and tell the Rabble why they’d be foolish to hire anyone else!

As always: GeoRabble is a free event, for GeoGeeks to celebrate, share and network. However, for catering purposes, we do need you to Register. You can join our Meetup group, or register here.

Hope to see you all on the 10th!

Blog, Sydney

Heads-up for GeoRabble Sydney’s Xmas party!

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To all you Sydney Rabblers: we are coming back with an awesome Christmas party event in early December.

Stay tuned for the exact date & location, to be announced shortly. In the meantime: if you have any 2014 (success) stories to share, or have a great idea for 2015 or beyond, drop us a line now on sydney@georabble.org.

More news to follow: watch this space!

Blog

GeoRabble Auckland Post Event Notes

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Auckland GeorabbleThe inaugural New Zealand GeoRabble was held in Auckland on Thursday 25th September with 45 people attending from the Survey and GIS communities. The event food was sponsored by Glenn Stone Insurance, thanks Glenn.

The four presenters gave excellent presentations on a variety of topics:

  • Linda Bulk, Director at Aeronavics Ltd, Advance Aerial Solutions gave a fascinating talk on the history of developing her UAS company in New Zealand including the challenges of building UAS vehicles to meet the demand for increasing payloads and very diverse applications.
  • Geoff Leyland, Director of Incremental Ltd, spoke about his development of routing solutions for Auckland businesses using a variety of open source databases including OpenStreetMap and how these solutions had delivered significant cost savings to his clients.
  • Alex Raichev, talked about how he had seen a number of overseas web sites that involved mapping the location of regional data and personal variables and how he was involved in the development of the Affordability In New Zealand site. Alex did a live demonstration of the site which provides colour coding of the Auckland’s area units by their affordability based on an individual or couple’s cost to rent, commute, park and car ownership.
  • Malcolm Archbold, Beca Ltd, delivered a presentation on the creation of 3D models using digital photos taken with a handheld camera. By taking digital photos of an object and using cloud computing software it is possible to develop a 3D model which can be geo-referenced and used in many geospatial applications.

Many thanks to the presenters and attendees who made this first Auckland GeoRabble a very successful event. The feedback was overwhelmingly in favour of doing more of these in the future.

Blog, Tasmania

GeoRabble Tas #3 – Post-Event Writeup

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The third GeoRabble Tas event was held on Thursday the 25th of September and we had a record 61 people register to attend. The event was held upstairs at The Republic Bar in Hobart and was sponsored by Lester Franks (thanks again, LF).

Presenters were excellent as usual. Presenters and presentations were as follows:

  • Arko Lucieer spoke about the efforts of Terra Luma, which is a group organised out of UTAS that are researching unmanned aircraft system  (UAS) applications. He spoke about the difference between airborne LiDAR, structure from motion and their work comparing the two techniques, as well as a number of specific applications of UAS as a data capture platform.
  • Adrian Fairfield, from Cohen and Associates, then spoke about projects that their platform had been working on, including capturing ortho-imagery across coastlines and other inhospitable areas.
  • James Head-Mears showed us all the fancy close range point-cloud creation tools that Lester Franks use in order to capture a variety of data for a variety of applications, and he showed us the process of reverse engineering an army truck.
  • Finally, Simon Allen wowed us with a great talk on getting results, with his SWAMP, or Shallow Water Autonomous Mapping Platform. The SWAMP is a robot boat, created with a few thousand dollars worth of off-the-shelf hardware, which was used to collect ground-truth or training data for a cloud-based machine learning algorithm, which then estimates the depth of the entire Derwent Estuary! (I think that’s it in a nutshell…) His more important point was that often a lot of time is spent developing the perfect solution to a problem, while it is often just fine to build an imperfect solution that might just work even better. It fits well into my little philosophy of ‘perfection is the enemy of the good.’

In summation, a lot of interest was piqued, some delicious food consumed and lots of catch-up occurred. It will happen again, soon, and so I’ll see you there at the next GeoRabble Tas.

– Alex

 

Arko Lucieer presenting about UAS
Arko Lucieer presenting about UAS
What a handsome audience!
What a handsome audience!
Blog

GeoRabble Auckland: Final Speakers Announced!

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Registrations are now open for the inaugural Auckland GeoRabble, Thursday 25 September! Attendance is free, but for catering purposes we need you to register. Register here.

The presenters are:

  • Geoff Leyland, Incremental, Route Planning on Open Data. Alex will be talking about custom solutions for better decision making using tools like mathematical and economic modeling, optimization and simulation and open data.
  • Alex Raichev, Affordability in New Zealand – making the website. Visit the website at http://affordability.org.nz/
  • Linda Bulk, Aeronavics – Advanced Aerial Solutions, Multirotor airframes & Ready to Fly – Industrial platforms – Tools not toys. Linda will be talking about how they Aeronavics Ltd is a manufacturer of advanced multi-rotor airframes, RTF craft and related accessoriesthe expanding market in aerial robotic systems for aerial photography, filmmaking, professional cinematography and the service sector.
  • Hamish Campbell, Koordinates, Licensing, Geodata and You – a brief look at the the open geodata licensing landscape. Hamish will be taking about licensing and legal issues with open data and releasing data into the wild.
  • Malcolm Archbold, Beca, Creating 3D models using your camera. With the advances in digital imagery pixel correlation anyone can now create high resolution 3D digital models using a hand held camera.

 

There is all the usual stuff, free food (courtesy of Glenn Stone Insurance), beer and other drinks, not so free. Join us for great conversions, networking and learn about interesting stuff. See you there!

Date: Thursday 25th September, 2014

Location: Horse and Trap Pub, 3 Enfield St, Mt Eden.

Time: Staring at 5:30pm, Presentations from 6 pm, finished around 7:30 pm

Format: A handful speakers, 10 mins each plus questions

Registration: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/inaugural-georabble-auckland-tickets-13016754463

Many thanks to Glenn Stone Insurance for sponsoring

Any questions or queries to auckland@georabble.org