Peter Batty, Conference Chair for FOSS4G Denver 2011 (held September 12-16) says that the number one reason to attend the FOSS4G conference is that “open source software for geospatial is gaining strong momentum with high performance and high-profile use cases, and you need to know what's available. If you are currently using closed source commercial software, you owe it to yourself and your organization to understand the capabilities, cost justifications, and the community of open source geospatial software developers.”

About five years ago, the group I worked for at Microsoft looked at what was happening in the blogosphere and decided to bring it in-house. We saw that the conversations needed a