Geomob Podcast - 1. Welcome

Ed 00:11 - For a long time now people have been asking how they can experience Geomob even if they unfortunately aren't able to be in one of the cities where we're hosting the event. The GMO podcast is going to be our channel to try to take the content and the discussions that we have at GM up and open them up to a wider audience to try to get more people involved. Hi everyone. I'm Ed Freyfogle, the organizer of geomob. Welcome to the trailer episode of the geomob podcast. For the last 10 years I've been organizing geomob in London. It's been a regular series of events. We meet every two, three months in the evening, five or six different people present their projects each one and talking for about 10 or 15 minutes. The projects can be anything related to the geo space. Could be startups, could be academics, it could be obvious, it could be big companies, whatever it is.

Ed 00:58 They tell us why their project is interesting. What was challenging about it. Hopefully also some lessons that everyone else can take away from the project to use in their own work. And then finally at the end we head off to the pub and have some beers and discuss. It's a lot of fun, but one negative of the event has been that it's, it's a very in person event, so I often get contacted by people who see the event geomob, the hashtag on Twitter or they follow us or they're on the email list and they say, look, this looks really great. Is there any way you can make videos? Is there any way you can put the content online? We have looked into it a few times, but the problem is doing, doing good videos, videos that are worthwhile to watch. It's actually a fair amount of effort in terms of recording the videos, producing them, all that kind of thing.

Ed 01:44 But then we have the idea that maybe we could, maybe a podcast would be a better lower effort format that would still enable some of the value of the events to be shared globally. And so that's what we're going to be doing basically every two weeks or so we're going to be looking to get a new episode of the podcast up. We'll be doing a couple different things. First of all, of course interviewing the speakers who speak at the different events. Meanwhile, while we started GM up in London, we're now operating in four different cities. We have regular events in London still, but also our Selena Munich. But those communities have really grown over the last year and also in Lisbon. So basically geomob has gotten so big that it's no longer possible for anyone to really attend all the events. And so as a result it became more urgent that we find a way to share the great content.

Ed 02:29 And my hope is that you'll join us on this podcast as we talk with some of the speakers. Don't worry, won't just be me talking at you. I'll have regular Cohoes. One of the primary co-hosts will be my good friend, longtime geomobster and geo industry veterans, Steven Feldman, who many of you from London will know. We'll be probing the speakers, learning more about their projects, but also to be a chance to go deeper and hash out some of the themes that we see coming up again and again, some of the industry events, things that are happening and that will kind of be our format. I guess another thing that listeners may find interesting is that we'll be documenting kind of the ups and downs of our own geo projects. So in my case it's the geocoding API called open cage and the Ennis Stevens case. It's a service called Napa larry.org which is a crowd source collection of different maps.

Ed 03:18 So we'll be sharing a bit about those projects as we go by through the different episodes and you can learn, hopefully learn from some of the ups and downs and stuff. There's experiences, so like geomob itself, the whole thing will be a bit of a mix kind of see how we get along. But I'm quite excited about it and for the chance to welcome a whole new world of geomobsters literally in that, and people can be listening from all over the globe, but also to reinforce and help some of the great speakers that we've had over the years, get their message out a bit more. And because we've had so many phenomenal projects over the years, it's really, it's been a lot of fun. And I've learned a lot. Sometimes we learn from, you know, we have jaw-dropping moments where people show off really, really cool things that they've invented.

Ed 03:58 Other times the learning is people share, you know, projects that they worked on that didn't quite work out, that didn't pan out the way they hoped and they share some of the lessons that they picked up along the way. So I'm quite hopeful that we can take that, those learnings and that sense of excitement and the sense of wonder at this industry and bring it to the podcast format. And I hope you'll be coming along with us on this journey and that the geomap podcasts will become a regular part of your listening schedule. Before we close out, I guess I should mention that we're inspired by a couple of other great geo podcasts. We're by no means the only people trying to do this and so while you wait for our first episode to come up in a, in a week or so, uh, you might want to check out some of these others if you're not already listening to them.

Ed 04:37 First and foremost would be at the map scaping podcast, which does a series of interesting industry profiles. I had the good fortune to be interviewed about geomob on the knob skipping podcast a few months ago and we'll make sure to get that link in the show notes where you can check it out. The walls I've linked to map scaping in general to others that I particularly enjoy. One is called, I'm seen from above, which as the name of justice, a podcast kind of about earth observation and remote sensing and one of the, one of the areas of the geo industry that's undergoing rapid rapid innovation, so worth adding to your regular listening schedule. And another one is the G adorable podcast, which has kind of more of a a GIS focus because the two co hosts, that's kind of their area of specialty and kinda they, they stay on top of developments that are happening in that space.

Ed 05:24 Yeah, so we'll have all of that up on the show notes, which you can find on our website, which will be the dot com let me close out by making a few brief announcements about our upcoming events. If you can, hopefully while I do hope you subscribe to the podcast, of course you should still come along to the actual events and not least for the beer paid for generously by our sponsors. So I'm on the 18th of March, we'll be back in London on the 26th of March. We'll be in Munich. Then we take a brief break for Easter and if I've done the sixth the Bay, we'll have our next Barcelona event and finally in June we'll be having another event in Lisbon. We're still working on nailing down the exact date and venue there, but as soon as we can, we'll post that up on the website.

Ed 06:08 I guess a final request of you, dear listener, is if this sounds good to you, if you enjoy geomob, if you enjoyed the events in the past, please spread the word to everyone else who found the podcast. Interesting. Please do come along to any of our events that you're able to make it to and even if you can't, please get on the mailing list, which again you can find over on our website, the geomap.com where we announce all the different events and share the various updates. That's pretty much all I have for you today, but yeah, I just wanted to announce kind of what we're going to get up to and Pope, we earned the spot in your regular listing schedule. If you have any suggestions for us, if you have ideas of what we can do on the podcast, please let us know.

Ed 06:45 And more importantly, if you have spoken to geomob in the past, and by now actually that's several hundred different people who have done that. So please do come forward and if you'd like to be interviewed and we can catch up on your project, or we're talking about all things geo in general, we're counting on having lots of interviews to keep the podcast interesting. So please get in touch and we'll book a slot where we can talk with you. Thanks very much for listening and I look forward to seeing you all at a future geomob event or soon bye.