WhereCamp EU 2011 will be held in the campus of the GLS Sprachenzentrum, one of Berlin’s leading language schools. The site is on Kastanienallee in the Prenzlauer Berg district of what was East Berlin, a deeply cosmopolitan neighbourhood with more than a fair share of bars and restaurants.

Easily accessible by U-Bahn (less than 5 minutes walk from Eberswalder Strasse, Senefelder Platz and Bernauer Strasse stations), by tram and with connections to the S-Bahn system at nearby Alexanderplatz and with gracious thanks to our hosts Nokia, promises to be the best WhereCampEU location yet.

Google is happy to return as a sponsor of WhereCamp EU, a great opportunity to bring together the dynamic Geo developer community of Europe in one of Europe’s greatest cities. Google believes in active participation, please fell free to grab a member of our developer relations or engineering teams who will be attending with any questions you may have about the many Google Geo APIs.

Ed Parsons, Geospatial Technologist, Google London.

To celebrate, we are are also releasing some more free passes:

Its dark and its cold, but Spring is just around the corner and so is another WhereCampEU. All I can say, is that we have a city, a venue and some possible dates. Its not London, and its not in the UK, and it should be around May.

Should be confirming venue and dates very soon now, hold on for an announcement next week.

ps anyone commenting on lack of proper attribution for the map can stay at home

Address: Sir Colin Campbell Building, University of Nottingham Innovation Park,NG7 2TU.

Download a map.

9:30 Registration

10:00 Introduction and WhereCamp kick-off.

10:30 First sessions begin

17:00 Wrap-up and break for dinner.

CC-BY-SA Maps from OpenStreetMap

As one of the original sponsors of WhereCampEU, it is a real pleasure to have them back again. GeoVation’s mission is to help people jumpstart their geo infused plans and give them the support they need to make their ideas happen. It does this by running innovation challenges designed to encourage the use of geography in addressing specific needs.

The current challenge, ‘How Can we improve Transport in Britain’, is looking to you to transform how we all get from A-B, and has £150,000 in seed funding to help you do it. The challenge is open to anyone, using any geography, so get your thinking caps on! The cash comes from the Ideas in Transit project which in itself is funded by the Technology Strategy Board, the Department for Transport and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, with all the funds going to support the winning entrants.

In addition, Ordnance Survey is providing a £7,000 prize for the person that makes the most innovative use of OS OpenData, so there is a big incentive to get involved.

The Ideas in Transit project is a collaboration between the University of the West of England, Loughborough University, ITO World and Ordnance Survey. It seeks to apply “bottom-up” innovations to the transport challenges faced by individuals and society, such as congestion and the rising cost of fuel. So its support for the GeoVation Challenge is a perfect fit.

The GeoVation team will be at WhereCampUK to talk more about the challenge and how geography can make a difference to everyone’s lives. Chris Parker, one of the GeoVation organisers says: “Transport is something that has an obvious geographic foundation and I believe that we’re going to see ideas emerge that could improve our public services and could change how we travel. We need the support of WhereCampers and I’m exciting about what they could come up with.”

So if you fancy getting your hands on a slice of £150,000, the place to start is on the GeoVation website. From there all shortlisted entries will be invited to develop their ideas at a GeoVation Camp before going on to pitch head to head for funding at a “Dragons’ Den” style showcase next year. The challenge runs from 28 September–26 November.

What is WhereCamp Europe?

WhereCamp Europe is an unconference; it’s open to everyone and you drive the agenda and the sessions. March 2010 saw the first WhereCampEU take place in London, with 180 attendees over two days from diverse backgrounds, including public, commercial and third sectors. It’s what you make it, so come along, listen, contribute and speak. See some of WhereCampEU in action: http://www.flickr.com/groups/1442338@N21/pool/

Who Will Be There?

WhereCamp Europe is open to everyone; from über hacker to beginner, from geo-hobo to seasoned professional, from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, and from mobile. If you have an interest in geography and how it’s changing the way in which we interact with the world then you should come along.

Signup

Seems like people enjoyed the unconference format of WhereCamp.EU:

“This sort of system would bring many academics out into a cold sweat as there is no formal way of ensuring quality presentations and sessions. I didn’t attend a single bad session though” - James Cheshire

“The voice of the individual often drowned out by corporate messaging at traditional conferences is prominent at events likes wherecamp EU, and it is a real step forward to see such events taking their place alongside more traditional industry shows now in Europe” – Ed Parsons

“My geobatteries were recharged at the end of the day and it prompted several thoughts about the conventional approach to running a conference” – Steven Feldman

“…really well organised, with great venues and food, and all that at zero cost thanks to very generous sponsors and a great bunch of volunteers!” – Patrick Weber

Thanks for all the great feedback on the tweets and blogs. If you are blogging about WhereCamp.EU, there’s a section at the bottom of the wiki page to list yourself.

So that makes two action-packed days of spatially-location-based-maptastic sessions:

We hope you found inspirational educational conversational value in the sessions you picked to attend (or the ones you ran!), but what about all the ones you missed? Let’s use the wiki to write up some descriptions of each of the sessions including contact details for the presenters, and links to any slides and other related resources. Dive in there and create the pages (green links are empty pages)   Obviously if you ran the session, this a great way to provide more information. But its a wiki! Feel free to kick off some description even if you weren’t running a session. We can add to it later:

>> WhereCamp.EU wiki <<

Wow that’s a lot of sessions! (took me over an hour just type all the session titles)

In addition to that there will of course be some continuing chatter on twitter (#wherecampeu) and tagged photos on flickr, slides on slideshare, etc  Tag your stuff with ‘wherecampeu’!