You can blame the cold and the dark days, but sometimes I do have an need to meet fellow ROS developers in person here in the Nordic!
I have been told that there are plenty of ROS using companies here in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. And there have been ROS developer meetups before, and of course we can’t forget the epic ROSCon 2024 in Odense, but there haven’t been so many since a while (at least, of what I am aware of).
So here perhaps a call for an place where we can coordinate and plan some more ROS meetups, so we don’t have to always travel far to meet and geek out about robotics and simulation! And yes, you hear that right, I have some self-interest here as well!
So here just a couple of things:
Why pan-Nordic and no groups per Nordic country? Well, I feel that that that is the best way to get everything jump started again, and all these countries are quite sparely populated. However, if this type of group can have a for instance, Icelandic Local user group, as a spin-off, that would be awesome of course.
Why in English and not in the local language This is a language that most of us can understand and speak here across all the Nordics and used in the ROS contexts as well. But like I said, if we will have country specific groups resulting out of this and rather want to do this in in the mother tongue, go for it!
So hence, for anybody wants to participate with this, please copy this and fill it in with your info:
Name:
Company/Institute/University:
City/Country:
Language preference:
Do you want more nearby ROS meetups?
Would you like to organize a meetup yourself?
And of course add anything you’d like to mention, like robotics events we should be aware of like ERF in Stavanger or the Robotics and Physical AI day by Mashup in Malmö.
So you ROS Vikings, spread this wide and far you and make yourself known!
Hey! Great initiative!
Name: Adam Leon Kleppe
Company/Institute/University: Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Department of ICT and Natural Sciences.
City/Country: Ålesund, Norway
Language preference: Equally good at English and Norwegian.
Do you want more nearby ROS meetups? Definitely
Would you like to organize a meetup yourself? Probably. You can certainly ask.
Let me try to get through a first meetup first and see how big the interest is. Now at least I know if I would organize something, at least a few people will show up
In the mean time I’ll think of a cool name and logo!
Thanks for the post and for taking this initiative. As we have discussed on previous ROSCons (Global) we feel that ROS Meetups and even ROSCon Scandinavia events are missing.
I hope that we can create some awareness and initially see how many meets up at the ROS Meetup in Malmø. I’m looking forward to seeing you there.
Do you want more nearby ROS meetups? Yes. We should make a ROS Meetup Copenhagen or ROS Meetup Odense (there is a big robotics community in Odense, remember ROSCon Odense in 2024)
Would you like to organize a meetup yourself? I would be happy to. Now we will start with the meetup in Malmö (extremely near Copenhagen, so no issue at all). Later we could host one in Denmark.
For anyone close to Malmö/Malmø (like Lund, Copenhagen or perhaps a bit further) would like to reply their interest in this discourse thread of joining the ROS meetup 14th of April (and more ideally perhaps sign up on Luma?)
