Not all Geographic Information conferences are created equal. A great proof point for this is IRLOGI, the Irish Association for Geographic Information. Today I've been in Dublin at their annual GIS Ireland 2014 conference, which is in its 19th year. I'd been invited to give one of the opening keynotes; who could resist such an invitation?

Held in the hidden conference centre that nestles unassumingly under the Chartered Accountants of Ireland's offices, GIS Ireland ticked all the boxes. The conference team had obviously worked hard to ensure that there was a wide range of topics being discussed and managed to avoid the "same people, same talks, same topics" trap that some conferences fall into. The coffee was hot and plentiful and the wifi (almost) stayed up and running all the time.

The starting point for the talk I have was an article called Today's Mapping Industry Really Does Need To Please All People, All The Time, which I'd written for GPS Business News in September. As there was an article length limit, I couldn't go into the detail I think this topic merited, but a conference talk is a different beast. This is what that article morphed into. This is B2*.

It's probably an oversimplification of a complex issue but geographic conferences or events can be somewhat polarised towards one of two extremes. On the one hand you have the solid, slightly reassuring and established GIS world whilst on the other we have the upstart, slightly shouty, web-centric neogeography community. These two worlds don't always co-exist particularly well and each can be equally distrustful of the other. Where 2.0 in the US tries valiantly to get these two worlds to talk to one another and to share a stage but it doesn't always work well; the GIS community brandish their desktop GIS system while the neogeo hackers point to their PHP based web mashups.

But this year in Stratford-upon-Avon something brave, intriguing and altogether worthwhile is happening; both communities are being represented at the AGI's GeoCommunity '09 conference, which takes place in a little over two and half weeks time. Yes, there's GIS practitioners and yes, there's neogeo developers but there's also speakers covering all points inbetween; just take a look at the PDF of programme for this year. Even the tag line for the conference, Realising the Value of Place, places emphasis on the meeting of the geo-worlds.