WALIS Forum
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008WALIS Forum has started, and we have our OSGeo booth. Many thanks to our sponsors Gaia Resources, Lisasoft, Maunsell and Lat-Lon. WALIS was started by the Western Australian Government in 1981 for coordinating across-government access and delivery of the geographic information held by WA Government agencies. I was going to write a few words about how great WALIS is, but Marnie Layborne, Director of WALIS says it so much better;
WALIS is all about participation and cooperation. Our role is to advance the spatial information industry in Western Australia and WALIS has traditionally coordinated the sharing and access of geographic information across government. We are now expanding beyond government to include the private sector, academia etc as the only way we can really realise a global vision is to include all the players. This is why we have as our theme for this forum, public private partnerships.
WALIS forum is held every 18 months, and has been consistently growing bigger. It’s just been announced there are over 800 registrations. Everybody who’s somebody in the spatial industry in Australia (and many from overseas, particularly NZ) is here. We’ve only just started, and already we have had healthy interest in not just what OSGeo is doing, but more importantly, what everyone can do with open source themselves.
