A diverse range of geo topics has been assembled for next Thursday’s Sydney GeoRabble from geo hacking to geo broadcasting to massive maps.

Register @ https://georabblesydney.eventbrite.com.au/ and get your fix of geo talks, beer and pizza

1. Stories from the frontline of GovHack – Team Fusrodata
2. Why a Spatial Professional is never on Holidays – Stewart Hay
3. The story behind designing GIS for Broadcasting – Channel 7 Election Maps, Bill Martin
4. It is not about the bike – using data to make better transport decisions – Rebecca Lehman
5. Geographic Biases in Scholarly Production – Frederick Michna
6. Creating User Friendly Massive Maps – Kelvin Nicholson

We are pleased to announce the following GeoRabblers who have volunteered their time to share their fantastic GeoStories at GeoRabble Melbourne #5.

If you haven’t registered yet to listen to these fantastic speakers and the opportunity to network with your fellow GeoRabblers then do so now at https://georabble-melb5.eventbrite.com.au/

Scott Manley – Making GIS Mobile

Scott will discuss some of the challenges around building a mobile GIS Apps. Some of the challenges he will share include; offline basemaps, offline overlays/features, performance and battery use.

Scott has been designing and building enterprise IT solutions for almost 20 years. With a recent focus on mobility, Scott is currently interested in the problem of creating usable and effective mobile geospatial solutions (spoiler, its not easy). Scott is a senior consultant with Geoplex.

Nathan Quadros – Working on your own sucks

Who likes working on their own? Not Nathan. Identifying problems involves talking to people… communicating. It is a great feeling to present a concept, obtain support from stakeholders and to produce results. Seeing the smile on people’s faces when they see outcomes, and the impact, makes a project worthwhile. I am demonstrating a collaborative project approach through examples of my work at the CRC for Spatial Information. This includes an eclectic mix  based on research communications, project work in the Pacific Islands and LiDAR quality assurance. It will end with a couple of ideas to stimulate discussion.

Nathan has spent his career focussing on problems. He has been heard saying, “If there were no problems why wouldn’t we just get robots?” From 2008 until 2011 Nathan was solving the Victorian Government’s problems, even setting up the keenly awaited Victorian Government’s office in Bangkok. More recently, Peter Woodgate (CEO, CRC for Spatial Information) came to him and said, “Can you solve my problems?” Naturally he was up for the challenge, and been at the CRCSI ever since

Stewart Hay – Are your online maps really reaching everyone?

Online maps are increasingly being used for presenting extensive amounts of information to the public. But are online map accessible to everyone? Stewart will take a look at how online mapping solutions fail to consider people with accessibility difficulties, why this is important and what can be done about it.

Stewart is the Principal Consultant for OneSphere and likes to help organisations get the best out of their GIS investment. His experience encompasses a range of industries from Environmental Management and Utilities to Emergency Services and all tiers of Government. During his free time he helps organise the Melbourne and Sydney GeoRabbles.

Craig Molyneux – Data to Design

Much of the spatial data we use today is designed for a single purpose – for use in creating print maps, display in a web GIS or recording specific details of a feature. With the development of multi-scale tile-based maps and there use in mobile devices, oftentimes this data requires major editing or addition of feature classes to make it fit for purpose. This presentation will look at the way he has been designing data to create stunning cartography multi-scale tile sets for mobile devices and web systems.

Craig has over 27 years’ experience designing and producing high quality cartographic products for some of Australia’s major publishers, including Hema Maps, Australian Geographic, Hardie Grant and Universal Publishers. His recent work includes the Jacaranda Atlas 7^th and 8^th editions, as well as the Jacaranda World History Atlas, Spatial Vision’s Outdoor Recreation Guide series print maps and iOS apps. He is presently studying his Masters of Land Information at RMIT University

Paul Cook – Statistical geolocation of twitter users

The language we use on social media gives hints as to our location, even when we don’t explicitly state where we are. Paul will present ongoing research on a system for automatically predicting a Twitter user’s city-level location, which usually gives a prediction within 10 Km of the correct location.

Paul Cook is a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in the Natural Language Processing Group in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne.

Matthew Coller – The Temporal Earth project: Visualising world history on all timescales

Temporal Earth is an investigative project to create a visualisation of world history across all timescales, based on similar principles to Google Earth.  This talk will include a series of proof-of-concept demonstrations covering topics in Australian history, archaeology, geology and palaeontology.

Matthew Coller is a PhD student in the School of Geography and Environmental Science at Monash University, currently completing his thesis in the hope of launching the Temporal Earth project worldwide next year.

The first Cape Town GeoRabble event, sponsored by AAM Group, took place on Wednesday evening at the Mowbray Golf Club in Cape Town. Approximately 20 people from various industry spheres including government, academia, engineering, geo consulting, software development and internet start-ups attended the night.

We started at 18h00 with a short welcome and all round introductions, followed by the first presentation delivered by Chris Tanner, titled 3D Modelling. He provided the audience with an amazing bird’s eye view on the level of detail and accuracy that can be achieved in 3D models created by combining aerial photography and LiDAR data. This was followed by another 3D orientated topic titled, Low-cost 3D mapping of an urban environment using Structure from Motion , presented by Sebastien Wenger. Mike Steyn entertained the audience with a summarised view into the past, current and future development in GIS through a presentation topic titled; The Moore’s affect in GIS. This thought provoking presentation highlighted the rapid growth in technology in general and how the geo world is following this trend. The last formal presentation was delivered by Chlodwik Rossouw who asked the question, Is GIS a profession or a tool? He highlighted the different uses of geo tools, technologies & skills across a variety of industry sectors and how industry specific knowledge is affecting our industry. Both Mike and his topics urged people to keep an inclusive and not exclusive mind set and therefore stay aware of what is happening outside of their own geo realm and to keep moving with technological and industry advances.

The night was concluded with quite a few open discussions on how we can build on this first GeoRabble Cape Town event in order for it to appeal to the wider geo community.  This successful first night was concluded by more general discussions, networking, food and drink.

Thank you greatly for all who attended, plus AAM Group for sponsoring the event! … until next time.

The inaugural African GeoRabble was hosted by the University of Pretoria and sponsored by AAM Africa. Over 30 GeoRabblers from industries spanning education, government, private and non-profit were treated to geoinspired talks from academic and private industry leaders.

First up was Peter Schmitz who shared on how GIS is being used to solve complex crime mysteries.

Peter was followed by Marius van der Merwe who unpacked “cloud computing in plain English”, how it affects the GIS community in a world that demands information at their fingertips. A truly inspiring look into the future of GIS applications and data storage, dissemination and analysis!

From the cloud to the sun, Samy Katumba exposed rabblers to Geoapplications in renewable energy mapping and how solar energy is being used to “em-power” African communities in remote locations.

Stuart Martin took GeoRabblers down a walk on memory lane using imagery. His interactive talk titled “looking beyond the picture” captured moment’s history and how through further thought one can extract more than meets the eye.

Before we knew it, Victoria Rautenbach was in the spotlight shedding insights into spatial cognition and perception. Victoria shed light on how GIS and gaming is demystifying gender stereotypes in spatial perception.

Thanks to the South African GeoRabble team for their commitment in making this first event a huge success. We look forward to many such events throughout South Africa in the years to come. Off to Cape Town we go. To register, visit http://georabble-capetown.eventbrite.com/