floatingsheep: IronSheep 2012: First Glimpses

Apologies for the lack of posts over the past week, but we were first in the thick of IronSheep-itude and then busy trying to catch up on everything (teaching, sleeping, family, personal hygiene, etc.) that we put on hold for the event.

But to sum things up, it was a great success! Not only was it a lot of fun but it helped push forward thinking about how to approach user-generated data and online mapping technologies more generally. Over the next weeks we'll be posting a lot of material/maps from the event, the debriefing session at the AAG and thoughts about next steps.

But first some heartfelt thanks to those who made this event possible. First a very big thank you to Pivotal Labs (especially Magda Kozak) for be so unbelievably generous and helpful in providing the space for IronSheep. It was perhaps the closest thing to map-geek heaven we're going to find in this world. Also many thanks to Sean Gorman of GeoIQ who provided key encouragement and connections (although sadly couldn't attend in the end) and Javier de la Torre of Vizzuality who made the key introductions to secure the space. Thanks to all those who attended the debriefing session at the AAG, there was a lot of good food for thought/debate coming out of that. Towards that end, see the upcoming #geowebchat scheduled for Tuesday, March 6th, with a slightly longer overview of the debate outlined by Jeremy Crampton here.

Thanks to all the floating sheeple – Mark Graham, Taylor Shelton, Monica Stephens, Candice Wallace and Ate Pourthuis – who scrounged data and organization to pull off the event.

The Floating Sheeple

Finally many thanks to all the attendees who were willing to take a chance on something as strange-sounding as IronSheep. They are featured below (in team pictures) and we look forward to hearing from them as they describe their maps.