Spring in Perth brought a record local crowd of 120 Georabblers together to talk about “The Rise of the Machines”. For the first time we were joined by a few more via a (more or less) live telecast on Periscope.

The always original David Brady dusted-off his MC hat for the night to introduce the speaker line-up to talk about life in a post Lake Maid drone world, and the reality of training computer algorithms as well as humans. The Georabble Perth team give a call out to NGIS Australia and Landgate – WALIS for feeding and watering a hungry group of Rabblers.

We kicked-off with Matt Barrett with a “Game of Drones” – covering a lot of ground as you can with drones for utilities. That got the Rabblers and friends talking about everything drone –from piloting to farming.

Piers Higgs, resplendent in a (way too) clean and crisp Maps WA uniform talked about the Good, the Bad and the Ugly drone pilots. Piers had plenty of material to work with on why mixing amateur model plane pilots, drones and fires are such a bad idea. The Georabble Perth team give a second call out to get involved in the Maps WA volunteer team – ping mapswa@dfes.wa.gov.au to get in touch.

Fedja Hadzic, the guy with the best job title in the room – Inventor – walked us through about how he’s training computer algorithms to explore big data, including coming-up with the right questions to ask so we don’t wait centuries to get “42”.

Robert Lednor picked-up the Drones thread again – attempting to explore “not just the cool stuff”. Lucky for our Rabblers it’s hard to make geo un-cool – so Robert just kept exploring.

We wrapped up Georabble #14 with Mark Taylor on the Certainty of Uncertainty – kicking off with a visual geo-quiz on some pretty ancient hardware and challenging us to think about who uses what we create and what they really need.

A couple of newbies discovered us via Twitter on #georabbleper. We hope see you all again, with your friends at Georabble Perth #15 on GIS Day – Wednesday, November 18, 2015. Stay tuned via #georabbleper for more info soon.