A poster session is the right place to not only perform several times your elevator speech but also explain the abstract model of your research printed in an A1 paper sheet. Then after few times you find that your idea also inspires someone else and that short presentation became a chat with coffee and biscuits, at that time you realize your poster session was successful.
That was our sensation last October at the Royal Geographical Society in London, where we were invited to the closing meeting of the COST Energic Action IC1203 (European Network Exploring Research into Geospatial Information Crowdsourcing). Our two poster among 15 were visited and commented with multiple researchers, we also received multiple opinions, feedback from our ideas as well as invitations for visiting research teams for contrasting existing developments to improve ourselves.
During the conference we attended interesting presentations about VGI and the way that this concept have evolved including interesting global initiatives entirely supported on this philosophy like the Humanitarian OpenStreet Team (https://hotosm.org/).
We also had the privilege of attending Prof. Goodchild presentation about the future of VGI where the focus was far away from new devices or technologies and closer to a social sciences reflection, the need of focusing more on the PLACE instead of their coordinates extensively explained by Goodchild, help us to better analyze our contributions to the Open City Toolkit by considering citizens’ perception and the fact that they are experts not only on collecting volunteered data but also on using them for decision making.
More about the Cost Energic Action IC1203 at http://vgibox.eu/
Manh Khoi Ngo and Diego Pajarito acknowledge the invitation from COST Energic Action IC1203 to attend their Final Conference.