You, yes you, can help the Cloud Native Geospatial Movement!

Chris Holmes
4 min readFeb 10, 2025

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Have you benefitted from Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF’s? SpatioTemporal Asset Catalogs? Zarr, COPC or GeoParquet? Not just the formats, but the whole ecosystem of tools and data around it? Well I’d like to present you with an incredibly easy opportunity to ‘pay it forward’ and help build and expand the movement. And all you have to do is attend a conference! One that should be a totally awesome experience, the first in-person CNG Conference, from April 30th to May 2nd.

I have big dreams for this conference, as my hope is that it can expand in the next few years to become a truly vendor-neutral gathering for anyone working in and around geospatial data. To be one of those conferences that has the critical mass where you know ‘everyone’ you want to talk to will be there. In North America there’s really only two options for this: Esri UC and GeoINT. Both are incredible events, but Esri UC controls their guest list (as they should…) and GeoINT is very focused on defense and intel (as it should…). I think a third would go beyond ‘GIS’ and beyond the strong core military-oriented use cases that do provide the core economic engine for the industry today. It’d be a big tent that is welcoming of anyone working with geospatial data on any use case, at any scale, with any tool.

The first CNG Conference will be the biggest Cloud Native Geo event ever, but it will not be a huge affair, and it’s really important that we ‘sell it out’ and demonstrate the momentum to get to larger venues and larger sponsors for the next few years. And I believe it’s going to be an awesome gathering of all types of people who like to nerd out on solving real world challenges with geospatial data and insights. You’ll certainly learn some new stuff, and make connections that you’ll likely reap rewards from for years. The cloud-native communities are a collection of tribes working on related problems, and this is going to be the first true in person gathering that combines the different tribes, to borrow from how FOSS4G is often described. FOSS4G is one of my favorite conferences, and my hope is we can get that same energy, but expand from open source software to be inclusive of any commercial software, and also to be more centered around data (and standards).

So please, buy your ticket soon and join us! And don’t worry if you’re not already deep in Cloud-Native Geospatial, or even barely know what it is, as a major goal is to help everyone learn. One of the three primary tracks is ‘On-ramp to Cloud-Native Geospatial Data’.

From https://2025-ut.cloudnativegeo.org/

There’s a great line-up of speakers, with more coming. And if you want to give back ‘more’ than just attending, please apply to present and share successes you’ve had with Cloud Native Geo. If you work for or lead in an organization that has benefitted from CNG then please try get them to sponsor. There are a number of benefits your organization gets from sponsoring, and not just at the event — it also comes with commercial membership to Cloud Native Geo Forum. This gets 8 individual memberships to CNG, plus a blog post on CNG website, and a speaking slot at an event. And I’m pretty sure if they come in as sponsors soon then that spot will be at the CNG Conference. It will be a great opportunity for your products/work to reach an influential audience, in a vendor-neutral environment. If you need any help convincing your organization to sponsor feel free to get in touch — I’m happy to help.

I’m excited about how this event will build momentum for the CNG Forum. It’s a consolidation of this movement into a bit more of a formal structure, with a great mission:

The vision is to make geospatial data easier to access to use, and to grow the resources being invested to make that happen. It’s all under the Radiant Earth non-profit (501(c)3), which means that all revenue from membership and the conference (after covering costs) goes back into strengthening the community, bringing people together more, and fulfilling the vision.

So please buy your ticket, join the CNG forum, present and/or sponsor. It will make a real difference, and I promise it will be a valuable and fun time in Utah.

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Chris Holmes
Chris Holmes

Written by Chris Holmes

Product Architect @ Planet, Board Member @ Open Geospatial Consortium, Technical Fellow @ Radiant.Earth

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