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On April 24, 2006, the Opening Session of GITA`s Annual Conference 29 in Tampa, Florida, will include a feature completely new to the event. Foregoing the traditional keynote speaker, GITA`s Board of Directors has approved a motion by the Annual Conference Committee to conduct an educational and entertaining Interoperability Demonstration. In doing so, GITA is challenging the industry to meet the theme for this year`s conference, "No Barriers: Connected. Responsive. Prepared". This demonstration will feature integrated data, products, solutions, and services from multiple organizations, showing how standards-based, commercial off-the-shelf geospatial software, data and services can be used to remove the barriers within a geospatial community. GITA`s Geospatially Enabling Community Collaboration initiative, or GECCo, is a project that is helping local communities protect their critical infrastructure. Based around a to-be-determined GECCo scenario that will hopefully include the Tampa Bay area, participants will be able to demonstrate to an estimated 1,200 session attendees how critical and complex tasks that used to take days now take a fraction of that time to complete; all through the use of open architecture and standards-based implementation. Although this session will be based on technology and special attention being given to Web services, the goal of the demonstration is to show decision-makers how the use of interoperable technology provides will help facilitate quicker, more accurate, and less costly decisions. This Call for Participation is open to everyone; however, all participating organizations must be members of GITA. A committee has been established to review submissions for participation. Based upon those responses, selections will be made for participation. GITA will not provide funding or reimburse costs associated with this demonstration. Commercial presentations and product demonstrations will not be accepted. It will be the responsibility of the submitting organization to attend regularly scheduled teleconferences and collaborative demonstration dry runs during the planning and preparation stages (if applicable, a data or service provider may only need to be available if situations or questions arise). All costs, other than standard audio/visual support at the live demonstration and the collaborative preparation environment, will be at the expense of the participants. If your organization is interested in participating in this unique demonstration, please send a short description of your offering, along with complete contact information, to interop.proposal [at] opengeospatial.org prior to October 14, 2005. Pending membership in GITA, nonmembers may be provisionally accepted to participate in the demonstration.

Candidate Submission: Wed, 2005-09-14 17:00
Close request period: Fri, 2005-10-14 17:00
TC and PC vote to issue request: Fri, 2005-10-14 17:00
Begin request period: Wed, 2005-09-14 17:00