Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) Indonesia was once again involved in an International Event. This time, HOT participated in Free Open Source Software for Geoinformation (FOSS4G) 2014 Asia at Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok, Thailand.
The event aims to bring together FOSS4G users and developers worldwide and foster closer interactions with and among Asian communities in order to share ideas for software and applications improvement. Moreover, this event was also held to commemorate the FOSS-GRASS User Conference that was first held at Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand on 12-14 September 2004.
FOSS4G-ASIA 2014 consisted of various activities, those are workshops, presentations, poster exhibition, and code sprint. In the workshop activity, some FOSS4G applications were discussed thoroughly, such as GRASS, PG Routing, Map Mint, OSHW, Zoo, QGIS and InaSAFE. As for the InaSAFE workshop, it was presented by Yantisa Akhadi and Harry Mahardhika from HOT Indonesia. In that workshop, HOT explained the initial concept of how InaSAFE is used in Indonesia and the use of InaSAFE for multiple hazards such as floods, earthquakes and volcanoes. Some participants were quite enthusiastic about the workshop and told HOT Indonesia that they intend to duplicate InaSAFE into their projects.
After the workshop session in the first day, the second and third day were filled with presentation sessions, in which some participants became keynote speakers. Including Yantisa Akhadi from HOT Indonesia who presented about The OpenStreetMap Data use for Data Preparedness in Indonesia. In addition, there were also several presentations about the achievement of other projects such as 10 years FOSS4G in Japan, Lesson Learned from Open Source Implementation in Thailand, 7 Reasons you should come to FOSS4G 2015 in Seoul, etc.
During the presentations, there were also some technical sessions where participants are lectured about various opensource applications in accordance with the criteria or specific themes. The themes that were brought up are FOSS4G in disaster mitigation management, FOSS4G in local and regional administration, Using FOSS4G in business and FOSS4G to improve the quality of life, etc. In each theme there were 3 technical sessions delivered by different participants.
There was also a poster exhibition session where some participants showed wide range of products that they have made using FOSS4G. Many participants participated in this activity and their posters were awesome. Some of their projects are Three Dimensional Geologic Modeling System based on FOSS4G products, 3D Geological Modeling for Hanoi City Using Borehole Data, Development of large-scale urban analysis using Apache Hadoop platform, and many more.
The last activity in FOSS4G-Asia 2014 was held on Friday, December 5th 2014. There were two separates activities in this day. There were Code Sprint and GIS Indonesia Meeting. Code Sprint was similar to OSM Mapathon, but they coded instead of mapped. GIS Indonesian meeting was held under Indonesia National Mapping Agency‘s (BIG) request to the committee. In this meeting, participants from Indonesia and also the developers or users FOSS4G who have interest in Indonesia had casual discussions about the development of FOSS4G in Indonesia. In this occasion, BIG gave a presentation on their plan to create an open access portal using FOSS4G-based platform. They told the participants that they really hope wide range support, especially from Opensource Community in Indonesia.
In the closing session, the committees announced the next International FOSS4G’s location, Seoul South Korea. They also told participants to join International FOSS4G 2015.
