I wasn’t looking forward to FOSS4G North America. The political and economic situation in the US made it much more difficult to attract sponsorship dollars. The government shutdown and the preceding sets of arbitrary and capricious cuts to government staff made attendance hard to predict. Three weeks prior to the event, it was not at all obvious it would be successful. It simply felt hard and, for me, that made it one more hard thing in a year that has been full of hard.
To those of you who tuned into this post expecting a FOSS4GNA recap, I apologize in advance. There will be something like that before it’s done, but I’m going to veer off into some personal processing first. This year started with some health issues for me. The issues themselves were mostly not dire and there are others in our community who have endured much more serious health issues recently. I started the year with two consecutive eye surgeries, one planned and the other unplanned.
The first was a scheduled cataract surgery, which is a routine and mostly boring procedure. I was on a table for 20 minutes and then sent home to recover. My vision was mostly back to normal after a week, and I was released from most physical restrictions after four weeks. The second came after I noticed a lot of floaters in the same eye. It was sudden and happened while I was traveling with my wife to visit a relative who was in the hospital.
Since it was the same eye, I assumed it was related to the cataract surgery and waited until we got home to call my doctor. That was a few days in total. It turns out I had a detached retina and those few days could have made the difference between an in-office laser procedure or the retina surgery that I ended up having. When I said “mostly not dire” it was because this issue could have led to permanent vision loss if treatment had been further delayed.
That did not happen, but I had a gas bubble in my eye for the next eight weeks, along with a lot more stringent physical restrictions. I could not run, walk quickly, bend, lift anything more than five pounds, drive, fly, or take any ground transportation that would take me above 2000 feet of elevation. I went from running 20-25 miles per week and going to the gym 3-4 times per week to doing nothing for essentially the first half of 2025. The physiological changes that come with such a sudden shutdown can be depressing and I am still working back from them. I am not remotely back to the level of fitness I had before the first eye surgery.
But it was the travel restrictions that hit the hardest. The period during which I was shut down almost exactly coincided with a rapid physical and mental decline in my father, who had turned 91 years old and lived 900 miles away. During that time, he entered hospice and it was not at all clear that I would be able to see him before he passed. As long as I could see the gas bubble at all in my eye, all of my restrictions applied.
The bubble finally dissipated in early June. I had a visit to my doctor, got a final clearance, and was able to fly to see him at the end of the month. Even though I had been kept fully informed, his situation was still startling to me. He recognized me when I got there, but he cycled in and out of lucidity and I was happy to be able to help my mother and my sister. The night before I left, he was in a good place and I cooked a simple dinner of chicken and fresh vegetables. His appetite had been off for months and his weight was dangerously low, but he loved vegetables and ate them heartily. The next morning was a down day for him. I sat with him until I had to leave and I am mostly sure he knew I was there and understood the things I said to him.
I left not knowing if I would see him alive again. I would not. He passed about 10 days later in early July. July was an eventful month for our family. Both of our kids got married, my wife and I celebrated 30 years of marriage, our granddaughter turned one year old, my father passed away and we had his funeral. An Air Force veteran who served 20 years and then worked a full career as a civil servant, he is buried in a veterans cemetery just north of Mobile, Alabama.
My father came from a generation that simply didn’t talk about things, especially their accomplishments. He could fix anything from a two-cycle engine to a jet engine. The latter he did for four US Presidents – Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon – while assigned to Air Force One for most of his active duty career. His decision to join the Air Force in 1952 rather than stay in Southwest Alabama and fix trucks and tractors for a living is why I was born and raised in Maryland. I don’t know what my life would have looked like had he not made that decision, but it would certainly have been different.
I got my work ethic from him and for that I am grateful. I loved him and respected him and I am sure he knew that. I know that he loved me and respected me, what I could do, and the life my wife and I have built for our family. That said, direct, meaningful conversation was not a hallmark of our relationship. Now, as I sort through his things, I find repeated evidence of his accomplishments, which were legion.
One example: I stumbled across a letter of commendation written to him by President Lyndon Johnson. Along with the letter was supporting documentation from officers my father reported to. In 1967, the Australian Prime Minister drowned while swimming. A state funeral was arranged on three days notice. The aircraft normally used for the President was undergoing a scheduled refit and could not be made ready in time, so the plane normally used for the Vice President had to be used. Apparently, it was not typically kept up to “Presidential standards” aesthetically or mechanically (what that may say about the Vice Presidency is left to the reader).
My father was tasked with leading the upgrades, which were made in time for the President to fly to Australia, resulting in the commendations I was reading. While I had heard mention of his many travels, some of which I have written about here, I had never heard about this episode. As I said, he came from a generation that didn’t talk about things. The discovery of details like this has initiated a process of reconciling the often stern and exacting father I knew with the man of extraordinary talent and leadership that is documented in those pages. The process has been non-linear, to say the least.
He worked on hobby vehicles in the garage for my entire childhood. I would like to be able to say that I spent weekends with him in those activities, but the mechanical gene passed me by. I was well into adulthood before I ever paid a mechanic for anything, but I otherwise did not benefit from those skills. That gap created a distance for sure.
As I have written about before, we got a computer when I was 10 years old and I taught myself how to program. My father was as intimidated by computers as I was by fuel injection systems. When he saw that I could work with them, he did not understand what I was doing, but he understood what it meant and he respected it. There is more to this that I am continuing to process, but I will leave it here.
As July passed into August, I turned my attention to the backlog of work that had accumulated as my customers graciously waited for me to deal with all of the details. That backlog kept me focused until about mid-September when I was able to mostly clear it out. Then the magnitude of July dropped on me with a thud. Roughly six weeks out from FOSS4GNA, sponsorships were down, registrations were slow, the success of the event was far from guaranteed – and I could not have cared less.
By the time I was driving to the venue on the Sunday before workshop day, I was just wanting to get through it and put it in the rearview mirror. Registrations had picked up and it looked like attendance would be on par with the previous year, but I was already looking past the event to simply having the time and space back in my life for the rest of the year. Because of that, I was also looking past the indicator represented by the uptick in registrations and forgetting the core value of FOSS4GNA.
Much like how open-source is not actually about the software – it is about the community of people who perceive a need and proactively align to fill it – FOSS4GNA is not about the event itself. Certainly, the workshops and sessions are incredibly informative and mostly devoid of sales and marketing speak, providing rich technical value. Creating a venue for such concentrated learning does have meaning, but the event is really about the community that comes together in those session rooms and hallways.
I found myself among 350 people who were genuinely happy and excited to be there, see each other, reconnect, meet new people, and learn from each other. Open source projects are almost always distributed, with participants interacting via email or video conferencing or pull requests. There is almost never a physical center of gravity like an office that provides regular in-person interaction. So, despite the stereotypes of the introverted open-source developer, there is genuinely an excitement when they get together at an event like FOSS4GNA.
I needed that energy more than I knew when I arrived. The default nature of the open-source community is can-do, will-do and being immersed in that was refreshing and meaningful. Long after the technical innovations (which were many) discussed in the sessions have vanished into obsolescence, I will retain the memory of the community and camaraderie of that event and how it showed up exactly when I needed it.
So FOSS4GNA 2025 is behind me. My plan to use the rest of the year to regroup, recover, and prepare for 2026 remains intact. But rather than being something I simply had to get past, the conference and the community have instead refreshed me, energized me, and have me approaching the remainder of 2025 with optimism and gratitude.
Much of the technical content from the conference will soon start to appear on the Project Geospatial web site. To all of the presenters who came and shared their knowledge, thank you. It’s a lot of work to distill complex concepts into 30-minute talks. It also takes a lot of vulnerability to share your work with a room full of experts. I am personally grateful that you do that every year. I am also thankful for the sponsors who regularly show up to make FOSS4GNA happen. It’s easy to think that sponsors mostly care about access to decision-makers and such, but the ones I spoke with recognized the importance of gathering the open-source community to keep the momentum going. Value is derived constantly from open-source, rather than through a single enterprise sale each year and the event’s sponsors see great value in enabling the community. That is a wonderfully mature and positive outlook.
But, most importantly, to every single person I spoke to at FOSS4GNA, no matter how briefly – thank you. Your optimism and enthusiasm was rocket fuel to me. For that, I am eternally grateful.
Header image sourced from a photo by Ghermay Araya and processed with ChatGPT
