I spent last week in Leeds attending the FOSS4G 2026 Conference. While the name looks a bit odd, FOSS4G stands for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial, which, as regular readers will know, is something we both use and support – so much so that Pixalytics was one of the Bronze Sponsors for this year’s event.
The 2026 conference took place on the 12th and 13th of October and featured two days of talks and workshops. The event is organised by OSGeo:UK who are the UK’s foremost community for promoting the use of open source geospatial tools, with members covering the user, service provider and developer community.
The conference began with a keynote by Abigail Page, Head of UK Geospatial Strategy in the Government Digital Service. She discussed her career and the importance of geospatial knowledge. Many people do not realise how heavily the world relies on satellites; the potential loss of Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) is on the national risk register and estimated to cost around ÂŁ1b per day. The geodesy supply chain is also classed as fragile, with fewer people training as geodesists and this knowledge critical for many systems, including quantum technologies.
After the keynote, the workshops ran throughout the day across multiple streams. I attended a series of technical talks and heard about a new QGIS plugin called CRAG for digital field data capture. It was designed for geologists but could be useful to many other groups. There was also a presentation on the adoption of QGIS within AEC (Architecture, Engineering and Construction or Consultancy) companies and how it needs to be made “enterprise ready” – ensuring everyone downloads it from a safe location, and the checking of plugins for security flaws – they were surprised how many people were using QGIS and the hundreds of different plugins in use!
The OSGeo:UK Annual General Meeting took place towards the end of the first day, and the structure will change so there are recognised members, which better supports voting, but no joining or annual fee. Fakhar Khalid from Sensat then gave the end-of-day keynote, where he discussed a “sense of place” and how to translate it to machines, as future GIS users will be agents as well as people. How do we answer questions about not only what exists where, but also why it exists?
Day two followed a similar pattern with Professor Anahid Basiri, Chair of Geospatial Data Science at the University of Glasgow & Director of the Centre for Data Science and AI, giving the opening keynote. For day two’s workshop streams, I joined the unconference in the afternoon, where we discussed a range of topics that reflected on day 1 and considered inclusivity. Overall, great talks and discussion, and a friendly conference for those new to the group/topic. OSGeo:UK organise training events, networking events and other fun events throughout the year, so sign up to the newsletter and keep informed about what’s happening.
Summary
One of the conference’s final sessions highlighted next year’s event: OSGeo:UK is hosting the global FOSS4G Conference in Bristol! It will be a bigger event, with two days of workshops, three days of talks, and a weekend code sprint bringing together people from around the world.
It is particularly exciting for Pixalytics, as I am part of the Organising Committee for next year’s event. I am really looking forward to what we are planning, and if you haven’t attended an OSGeo:UK event before, why not come along and join the community?
You won’t regret it, and I hope to meet you in Bristol!
