FOSS4G Europe (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Europe) is Europe’s leading conference for open-source geospatial technology. Every year it brings together developers, researchers, governments and companies working on projects such as QGIS, PostGIS, GeoServer, GDAL and many others. I attended this year’s conference on behalf of Geo-ICT to deepen my technical knowledge, connect with the community and deliver a workshop on building an open-source IoT geospatial pipeline.
But FOSS4G is about more than technology alone. The conference takes place at a time when Europe is increasingly discussing digital sovereignty and the role that open-source software can play in reducing dependence on proprietary platforms. That broader context made many of the conversations at the conference even more relevant.
Digital sovereignty starts with digitally independent infrastructure. Europe is increasingly recognising the risks of relying too heavily on proprietary software. The US CLOUD Act, for example, can require US-based companies to provide access to data, including data hosted on European servers. Given the shifting geopolitical landscape, Europe is becoming increasingly aware of this dependency and is looking for ways to reduce it, for example:
These are just two examples of a broader movement. Given these shifts, open source is more important than ever. FOSS4G brings together the open-source community around geospatial software. Its relevance is growing, but its model also raises an important question: if the software is free and open source, how do we sustain it? Modern IT systems commonly rely on open-source software, yet many of the people maintaining that software are not paid directly for their work. If we truly want this community to thrive, we should be willing to support it through funding or by contributing to software and events.
The journey was part of the experience. I travelled to Romania by train with Hans van der Kwast, Dirk Voets and Laura Agudelo Mayorga. Just as the heatwave in the Netherlands came to an end, the heatwave in Romania began. We managed to catch both of them, with temperatures in Romania reaching around 40 degrees Celsius. It made travelling quite intense, but the journey also gave us plenty of time together before the conference even started.
This was my first FOSS4G Europe, and I mainly went there to learn as much as possible on a technical level and to give a workshop. I learned a lot about different open-source systems and how they work together. From the outside, you often see individual applications or projects. At the conference, I started to understand much better how they form a larger ecosystem with many moving parts.
Joram and students during his workshop: From Sensor to GeoJSON: Building an Open Source IoT Geo-Pipeline
One of the things I enjoyed most was meeting the people who actually build the software. If you are a fan of a particular open-source project, a conference like this gives you the opportunity to meet its core developers, attend their workshops and learn directly from them. It felt like a real privilege to walk around among so many experts and technicians with such deep knowledge. There is an incredible amount of expertise at a conference like this, and it was great to be part of it.
At the same time, the conference did not feel formal or distant. I met many passionate people, and conversations quickly moved beyond introductions because everyone shared an enthusiasm for the subject. You could dive straight into the technical details and build connections along the way. That made the community feel a bit like one large family. Like every family, it has its discussions and struggles, but those are part of it too.
It was good to see that the conference also made room for those discussions. One example was the conversation about AI in open source: how can AI be used to contribute code, and when does it create problems instead? These are not simple questions, but creating space to discuss them openly is important for the community.
I learned not only from the sessions and workshops, but also from Hans, Dirk and Laura, and from the many unexpected conversations over lunch and dinner. Those informal moments were just as valuable. The conference gave me a much clearer picture of the open-source geospatial ecosystem and of how much knowledge, coordination and commitment it takes to keep it moving.
At Geo-ICT, we are actively strengthening our commitment to open source. At this year’s FOSS4G Europe, we put that commitment into practice by hosting a workshop. Like all our courses at Geo-ICT, it was hands-on and open-ended: we provided participants with the fundamentals, then gave them the freedom to develop their own ideas.
In the geospatial world, we are used to starting with an existing dataset. But what if you want to collect your own data? You could use a sensor and upload the results to a database. The good news is that building your first project is quite easy if you know where to start.
Workshop participants were introduced to the full architecture behind sensor data. The workshop covered building a sensor and sending its data to a backend over Wi-Fi. One of the advantages of open source is that different building blocks can work together when they follow open standards. This means you can also store and use the data in your own database.
We started the workshop slowly by introducing all the hardware components. Next, we built a blinking LED (the ‘Hello World!’ equivalent for hardware). The end product was a temperature and humidity sensor connected to a microcontroller and a GPS antenna.
It was really fun to give a workshop on hardware and see so many people get excited. During my discussions with Hans van der Kwast, I learned the value of self-paced learning and applied it to the workshop. This gave people the freedom to work at whichever pace suited them best. Some participants recreated the Romanian flag with LEDs, while others improved my code or received help with the configuration. Everyone worked in the same room, with participants helping each other. As an instructor, it can feel as though you are not adding value when you are not talking. Yet much of the learning happens while participants work through challenges themselves. One of my personal goals is therefore to bite my tongue more often and give that learning process room to unfold.
4 step IoT workflow
The architecture in the image above goes beyond a single sensor. It shows how a complete open-source Internet of Things pipeline can connect the sensor, backend and dashboard. The FOSS4G workshop offered a preview of our new From Sensor to Map with C++ and XIAO ESP32-C3 course. The Blink instructions later in this blog are an even smaller teaser: they cover just the first step of what participants build during the full course.
This course is part of a broader set of Geo-ICT courses that cover the different components of an open-source IoT pipeline:
The two From Sensor to Map courses cover a similar process using different tools. The XIAO ESP32-C3 course uses C++ and takes a more production-oriented approach. The Arduino Nano ESP32 course uses MicroPython, making it more accessible to beginners.
Each course can be followed separately, but together they provide the knowledge needed to build an open-source pipeline from a physical sensor to a backend and a web-based dashboard. This allows you to collect your own data, process and store it in your own environment, and turn it into an application that people can actually use.
In another blog, I have shared a tutorial on the first exercise; “Getting Started with the XIAO ESP32-C3: Make an LED Blink“. If you want the full experience, check out our course “From Sensor to Map with C++ and XIAO ESP32-C3”.
This course includes working with a GPS module, a temperature and humidity sensor, and standards-compliant data transfer using the OGC SensorThings API.
One of the biggest takeaways for me was a much deeper understanding of the open-source geospatial ecosystem. I came away with a greater appreciation for the amount of collaboration, coordination and long-term commitment required to build and maintain the software that so many organisations rely on every day.
At Geo-ICT, we already work extensively with open-source technologies and provide training in many of these tools. Attending FOSS4G reinforced how valuable that ecosystem is, not only for software development, but also for knowledge sharing and collaboration. The conference has given us new ideas for how we can continue to expand our expertise, incorporate more of the wider open-source ecosystem into our training, and share that knowledge with our community.
