It’s time to mark your calendars again. The Manitoba GIS Users Group (MGUG) 2013 Conference is October 2nd at the Victoria Inn Hotel & Convention Centre.
The conference keynote presentation will be delivered by Steve Coast, founder of OpenStreetMap (OSM) and Principal Architect at Microsoft's Bing Mobile. Once again TECTERRA has stepped up as the conference keynote sponsor.
Steve will discuss OpenStreetMaps past, present and future and provide insights into Microsoft's mapping strategy. It will be interesting to hear Steve’s comments on crowdsourcing and its influence on mapping.
The MGUG annual conference is the premier GIS event in Manitoba. Last year, the event was heavily advertised and nearly 500 people attended the conference. This year MGUG seems to be taking a different approach to conference advertising. It seems that there are fewer mass emails and the MGUG web-site doesn’t have the “GeoDrive to 500” that was used as a publicly announced goal for success in 2011 and 2012. Also by this time last year, both CBC and Shaw TV were part of the advertising campaign in addition to some key sponsors and a partial agenda (three key speakers, a Geomatics panel discussion with six GIS movers and shakers). My advice to MGUG is to release a bit more of the agenda now and more as it firms up.
Regardless of the advertising approach taken by MGUG this year, the MGUG Conference is the best GIS event of the year and a must attend for those in the geospatial industry. I can guarantee that there will be some excellent presentations and the opportunities for networking in the geospatial field are unmatched.
