AGI 2010

Finally time to sit down and think about the conference, here a few thoughts and comments on what I saw.

The plenarys were interesting Andrew Hudson Smith from CASA gave a very interesting and enthusiatic talk on the wide variety of CASA's work, he spoke with freedom and wasn't scared to say anything slightly controversial, Vanessa Lawrence huffed indignation sitting behind me a few times which was most amusing
Rob MacFarlane from the Civil Contingency Secretariat gave a talk essentially on commanility and finding a set of common operating  procedures, gave a good insight into a things from a central Government point of view.
The final pleanary was given by the head if ESRI UK.  Hmmmm.  It was a strange old presentation, saying that the Geospatial 'Community' has to do more to promote what we doin general and specifically to Government, strange thoughts from the major GIS supplier in the UK....  It sounded to me like a talk that could have been given many years ago.

The individual paper presentions were good, may have screamed if I had heard the phrase "in the current climate" one more time though.   The papers at the AGI in the past I have found to be purely a mechanism for advertising and this year that ones that spoke about a concept were the better ones.
The two talks that I enjoyed and took the most from were by Phil Francis from Informed who spoke on Linekd data(http://linkeddata.org/), a very interesting new subject and the future..?
The other talk that I really took something from was by Ian Coady on Output Geographies Census 2011, as a regular census user it was fascinating to hear how geographies are designed and decided upon.

The second day's plenary speeches a pair of contrasting speeches.  Lai Wah Co from the CBI gave a great presentation on the current state of the economy and where the CBI see it going.  A fantastic talk well pitched and good to hear something different.
The second plenary was by Vanessa Lawrence, head honcho of the OS.  Her message was very similar to that of the head of ESRI UK on the first day i.e. we struggle as an industry to get our message across.  Apparently her way of getting her message across is to fill her presentation with pictures of her with famous people........