On Feb. 27 2014, the second Italian open geodata day was held in Rome. The meeting organisers reported some 500 registered attendees. The event was arranged in a plenary session in the morning, and four parallel sessions in the afternoon.

This was -if I am not mistaken- the second Open Geodata Day. Last year I was not able to attend, so I left Grosseto very early on Thursday morning, with a lot of curiosity and some “expec” (they say you should never have strong expectations on things, but I think it’s ok to have a little).

The close-of-business was around 6.30PM, giving my regards to a mixed (public-private) delegation of various stakeholders from Puglia.

Some things which I noted during the day:

• some former GFOSS.it colleagues
• some former OSM amateur
• some prospective new “spaghetti open data” colleague (and it’s always interesting the first time you see for real somebody you have been following via e-mail over the past two years)
• questions via twitter, and questions from the floor

I don’t mean to propose a proper summary of the day. Even assuming I have the skills to do this, by 3PM I was already blown out by the 4.15 AM wake-up call. …I may not have been the best observer on site.

But I did note a few things.

• The co-existence in the same presentation of the four words Open, Street, Map, Inspire. I was pleased by this, and it gave me some old time blues;
• The will of the organisers to stimulate the community and the stakeholders;
• Yet again (since 2006), the parallel presence in the same community of an amateur perspective, a research perspective, and a business perspective.

There was also an interesting exercise proposed by the organisers: each attendee was given a paper form, to be filled in with something like “the open geodata app which you think is currently missing from your market”. I apologise with the organisers for not returning my feedback, and I’ll try to make my amends over the coming weeks.