To paraphrase both Douglas Copland and The Smiths, Geomob, the highly successful mobile/geo/location/place fuelled meetup for geographers, both latent and professional is on hold. Possibly permanently. As Chris Osborne, the founder and organiser, said in an email to all members of the group:
After a wonderful couple of years doing geomob, and the people powered success that was WhereCampEU, I’m afraid to say that I am stepping down to make way for some new blood.
That does mean that there is an opportunity for one or more of you to step up and continue geomob in the spirit it started – free, non corporate, disrespectful and focused on people doing things.
Get in touch if you want to take on the mantle, until then geomob is on hiatus.
Its been a blast
As both Chris and I found out, organising the WhereCamp EU event that took place in London earlier this year was an exhausting, if ultimately rewarding, task. Imagine doing that every other month?
I hope this isn’t the last we hear of Geomob; it’s been a major contributor to the Geo community in London and has, indeed, been a blast. It also gave me my very first Geo themed public speaking engagement and for that I’ll always be both profoundly grateful and profoundly embarrased at my first stumbling efforts.
If you’re thinking of taking up the role of Geomob organiser, I encourage you to do so; it’s a battering, weary, exhausting and sometimes thankless task in the run up to a meetup. Then you see the audience waiting expectantly , watch the speakers, listen to the Q&A session and before you know it the evening’s over in a rush; you won’t regret it.
Another Piece Of Bloggage By Gary
Self professed "geek with a life", geo-blogger, geo-talker and geo-tweeter, Gary works in London and Berlin as Director of the Places Registry for Nokia; he's a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, the chair of w3gconf and sits on the W3C POI Working Group and the UK Location User Group. A contributor to the Mapstraction mapping API, Gary speaks and presents at a wide range of conferences and events including Where 2.0, State of the Map, AGI GeoCommunity, Geo-Loco, Social-Loco, GeoMob, the BCS GeoSpatial SG and LocBiz. Writing as regularly as possible on location, place, maps and other facets of geography, Gary blogs at www.vicchi.org and tweets as @vicchi.
Mail | Web | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Google+ | More Posts (271)Other bloggage that may or may not be geo-related to this one:
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Last night I presented a deck on Fire Eagle at the first London Geo/Mobile Developers Meetup, held at Google’s UK headquarters in Victoria; the full write up is here....
- The Opposite Of Geolocation Is … Relocation?
First a disclaimer; there’s one elsewhere on this blog but this post merits another. I used to work for Yahoo! as part of the Geo Technologies group. I now work...
- Nestoria Interview
Hot on the heels of last week’s Fire Eagle presentation I was granted the privilege of an interview by Nestoria’s Ed Freyfogle; the interview is now up on Nestoria’s blog....
