We’re heading to Japan at the end of August for FOSS4G 2026, the annual gathering of the global open geospatial community. This year, our team is bringing one of our largest slates yet, with talks, workshops, interactive demos, and community sprint participation spanning STAC, cloud-native infrastructure, visualization, climate tools, and crisis response.

FOSS4G has always been a place where ideas turn into collaborations, hallway conversations spark new tools, and shared effort moves the ecosystem forward. Gathering this year in Hiroshima, a city with a profound history of reconstruction and international cooperation, adds particular significance to a conference built around openness, collaboration, and shared infrastructure.

That spirit aligns closely with both our work at Development Seed and the broader FOSS4G community. Open standards, interoperable tools, and community-driven development make geospatial data easier to access, use, and build on. FOSS4G is where many of the people building that ecosystem come together.

Before heading to Hiroshima, Pete Gadomski will join the STAC community at JAXA’s Tsukuba Space Center for STAC Japan, a three-day gathering leading into FOSS4G. Pete will participate in the August 25 STAC Sprint, where STAC practitioners will work together on the specification and ecosystem tooling.

Our Presence at a Glance

Across the week, our team will be sharing work on:

• Modern STAC infrastructure
• Cloud‑native data pipelines
• GPU‑accelerated raster processing
• Climate dashboards and visualization tools
• Open standards for crisis response
• High‑performance geospatial APIs and distribution systems

STAC & Modern Data Infrastructure

The STAC ecosystem continues to evolve, and our team is contributing talks and workshops that highlight new capabilities, production‑ready patterns, and emerging tools.

• Pete Gadomski — The modern STAC software ecosystem
• Pete Gadomski & Anthony Lukach — From Ingestion to Access Control: Building a Production STAC API with eoAPI (workshop)
• Anthony Lukach — Multistore: An S3‑compliant data distribution API
• Anthony Lukach with Michelle Roby — Source Cooperative: Publish, Discover, and Access Open Data with S3-Compatible Tools (interactive demonstration)

Why this matters: STAC is a key part of interoperable geospatial data. These sessions explore how modern tooling can make STAC faster, more flexible, and easier to deploy at scale.

Climate & Crisis Response Tools

Open geospatial plays a critical role in climate action and global crisis response. Our team is sharing tools designed to accelerate insight and support decision‑makers.

• Firza Riany — Accelerating Climate Action: Building GIS Dashboards with openEO and Titiler
• Sajjad Anwar — Open Standards and Tools to Accelerate Global Crisis Response
• Sajjad Anwar — The Great Retooling

Why this matters: Open standards and cloud‑native tools help governments, NGOs, and communities respond faster and more effectively to climate‑driven challenges.

GPU‑Accelerated Visualization & Processing

High‑performance geospatial workflows are becoming essential as datasets grow. Our team is showcasing GPU‑native approaches that make raster processing and visualization faster and more interactive.

• Kyle Barron — Browser-based raster reprojection with GPU-accelerated pixel resampling
• Kyle Barron — Fast, interactive, customizable raster data visualization in Python & the browser with deck.gl‑raster
• Kyle Barron — Using Lonboard for interactive STAC, COG, and Zarr visualization from Python (interactive demonstration)

Why this matters: GPU acceleration enables new possibilities for real‑time analysis, browser‑based exploration, and large‑scale machine learning workflows.

What We’re Excited About

FOSS4G is more than a conference — it’s a celebration of the people and projects that make open geospatial work. We’re looking forward to:

• reconnecting with collaborators from across the world
• learning from the brilliant work happening across the community
• sprinting on new ideas and shared standards
• exploring how open tools can support climate resilience, crisis response, and scientific discovery

Let's Connect

If you’re attending FOSS4G in Hiroshima, we’d love to meet you. Join our sessions, stop by our workshop, or catch us in the hallway. Our team will be sharing demos, discussing open‑source tools, and talking about what we're building and what others are working on that we're excited about.

See the full list of our August events and talks on our website.