On April 28th, local FabSpace project country leaders Sascha Heising and Bayzidul Islam were involved this year in the annual conference of “Global Navigation meets Geoinformation organized by cesah GmbH where the participation was about 250 visitors. Through this event FabSpace Darmstadt achieved the 4th Geomatic Day since the opening. The heterogeneous target group of the event varies from students to high level representatives, CEOs and staff of public administrations i.e. “Hessisches Landesamt für Bodenmanagement und Geoinformation”. Sascha Heising was engaged as moderator as well as presenter of FabSpace to the audience. Interestingly the panel discussion moderated by Mr. Heising was about “Satellite navigation and earth observation in a digitalized world”.

Sascha Heising presented a conceptual introduction about FabSpace especially for this event. Following the concept of storytelling, Heising decided to show a use case about shark attacks in Reunion island to illustrate the process chain of FabSpace activity. The story indicated the start of curiosity about earth observation to the data and tools using in Open Innovation and ending at rapid prototype testing in both the physical and virtual FabSpace Lab. Mr. Heising also underlined that FabSpace will be the “First-Step” towards every journey of Make-Create-Innovate with earth observation.

In parallel, Bayzidul Islam promoted FabSpace at the corresponding exhibition booth in the main hall at ESOC. He also promoted the upcoming FabSpace “Startup Week” together with Software AG. In addition to that Dr. Damian Bargiel was also able to give a speech about FabSpace. After the event the FabSpace Darmstadt team received important feedback to strengthen the local FabSpace concept. The event also showed that “FabSpace” is nowadays a well-known term in the Darmstadt and the Rhein-Main space community, thanks a lot for the support given by the participants, ESA/ESOC and all other institutions.

Booth of FabSpace during the conference.

All images: (c) Ines Dombeck, 2017