[Geowanking] Where 2.0 for geowankers

[Nathan Torkington]

Hi, folks.  I've spent the last few months pulling together the Where 
2.0 conference (June 29-30, San Francisco 
<http://conferences.oreilly.com/where>).  We're covering a lot of 
geowanking-related topics: open APIs for mapping, open data (and lack 
thereof), what you can (and can't) do on mobile phones, open source geo 
tools, social applications, and so on.  We'll have a Where Fair on the 
evening of the 29th, with a lot of cool projects on show, as well as 
the tech featured in talks throughout the day.  I'd love to see 
geowankers as attendees as well as speakers.

I know the price tag is a problem for many people, so I twisted arms 
and have a discount for members of the geowankers list.  If you 
register with the code 'whereg0wnkr', you'll get 35% off your 
registration fee.  There are other discounts to look at, too: if you're 
a student, you can get 65% off; academic instructor, 50%; non-profit 
staff, 40%.  The registration page 
<http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/39/register.html> has a full 
list of the available discounts.

I've tried to bring together a lot of different groups of people at 
Where 2.0.  We have open source folks (Tyler Mitchell, Paul Ramsey), 
closed data people (Navteq), open data people (Schuyler), researchers 
(Elizabeth Goodman, Sean Savage), small businesses doing cool projects 
(Squid Labs, Moto Labs), location startups that are doing well 
(uLocate), mapping middleware companies (MapQuest, Telcontar, 
Microsoft), Internet portals (Yahoo!, A9, working on Google), and we're 
working on getting established GIS people (e.g., ESRI), hardware 
vendors (e.g., Magellan), and telcos (e.g., Sprint, Nextel).

Some of these people we'll point to and say "these guys get it", others 
we'll be asking "how are you opening up to the grassroots developers?"  
If you have an axe to grind about what you want (or a product/service 
to pitch, heh), we'll have the people to vent/pitch to.  For people who 
haven't already got the geo religion, we want to educate them about 
what's out there, what you can do, what's in the way, and so on.  For 
you, people who already get it, I hope we'll have tech you haven't seen 
before (I know we have some announcements being made at the conference) 
and interesting people you won't have networked with elsewhere.

I'm heading back to plotting ETech attendees on Mikel's worldKit, but 
if you have any questions I'd love to answer them.  I'm a subscriber to 
this list, so feel free to ask on the list if you think other people 
would be interested in the answers too.

Cheers;

Nat