A Global Community in Tāmaki Makaurau
FOSS4G, Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial, is the annual global gathering of the open source mapping and spatial data community, organised under the Open Source Geospatial Foundation with, in 2025, its Oceania chapter. FOSS4G 2025 ran from 17 to 23 November at AUT City Campus: two days of workshops, three days of parallel conference sessions and two days of community activities, code sprints and local chapter events. The bid was supported by the Auckland Convention Bureau of Tātaki Auckland Unlimited and Tourism New Zealand Business Events. More than 400 people attended, and more than 50 workshops ran across the week. The delegate photograph in the atrium of the Sir Paul Reeves Building records the scale of a global series arriving in the South Pacific.
Opening the Conference
Professor Ghaffarian opened FOSS4G 2025 in the WG Building alongside Professor Mark Orams, AUT’s Deputy Vice Chancellor Research, welcoming the global community to Tāmaki Makaurau. Prof Ghaffarian was then Head of Department of Built Environment Engineering within the School of Future Environments, which hosted the conference and was its named institutional supporter. Sharing the opening with the University’s senior research executive signalled that the conference was an institutional commitment of AUT, not merely a venue hire, and placed the School at the front of that commitment.
Prof Ghaffarian’s own account, published on LinkedIn, described looking out over “a packed hall of Open Source Geospatial minds from across the world” and called it a milestone moment for the School. The same account set out what hosting meant: an opportunity to present AUT’s spaces, culture and commitment to accessibility, sustainability, digital equity and open knowledge to a community whose conversations ran from land management and disaster response to smart cities, climate change, remote sensing, AI, drones and IoT. The opening was therefore an argument about institutional values as much as a welcome.
Where Open Geospatial Meets the Built Environment
The opening carried weight because the built environment research Prof Ghaffarian leads depends on exactly the infrastructure this community builds. Digital twins of cities are only as good as the spatial data beneath them, and the most durable of those data infrastructures are open. His group’s review of digital twin technology for sustainable urban development assessed its potential contribution to SDG 11 in New Zealand, and its sequel, a wellbeing oriented framework for urban digital twins in Cities, argued that such models must represent the lived experience of residents as well as the physical fabric of the city.
Spatial analysis is equally central to Prof Ghaffarian’s climate work. His team has mapped summer outdoor thermal risk areas on an Auckland campus, reviewed what is known and unknown about New Zealand’s urban microclimate, and examined the uptake of city information modelling, the urban scale counterpart of BIM. These strands converge in Kaitiakitanga 1.0, the Endeavour Fund proposal for a digital twin of Auckland’s urban microclimate, which now underpins a 2026 Transition Research Fund expression of interest. Mobility research adds a further spatial dimension, from Prof Ghaffarian’s programme on decarbonising heavy freight to supervised master’s research on last mile urban freight in New Zealand’s central business districts. The interest in spatial structure is long standing: Prof Ghaffarian’s graduate research at Universiti Putra Malaysia used network analysis to visualise spatial planning, presented at CAADRIA in 2007.
Openness as an Institutional Position
Open source geospatial software raises questions of governance that the built environment is only beginning to confront: who owns the model of a city, who maintains it, and who is entitled to see it. Prof Ghaffarian has taken these questions into international institutions. In 2026 he conceived and now leads the proposal for a CIB Task Group on Digital Twin Governance, Interoperability and Lifecycle Decision Making in the Built Environment, approved in principle by CIB. The proposal treats interoperability as a governance problem rather than a purely technical one, the same conviction that underpins open standards in the geospatial world. As the sole academic advisor to the BIMinNZ National Committee, Prof Ghaffarian also sits where building information and spatial information must eventually meet; for councils and asset owners, the integration of BIM with city scale data is the practical meaning of interoperability.
The national dimension is equally relevant. As a member of the Artificial Intelligence Reference Group at the Office of the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor since 2023, Prof Ghaffarian contributes the perspective of design and construction to national thinking on AI, and FOSS4G placed AI, machine learning and remote sensing at the centre of its programme. An opening from a built environment leader with these commitments told the geospatial community that its tools have a ready partner in the disciplines that design, build and manage cities, and told the School’s own researchers where their next collaborators may be found. That message is the lasting content of the welcome, whatever the specific words on the day.
Institutional Consequence
FOSS4G 2025 widened the range of international communities that AUT’s built environment School has hosted under Prof Ghaffarian’s departmental and School leadership. Between July 2024 and December 2025 the School hosted the first International Group for Lean Construction conference in New Zealand, SASBE 2024 with CIB W116 and, a week after FOSS4G, the inaugural GDI conference. FOSS4G added a global technical community outside the School’s own disciplinary series, and one that shapes the data and software on which smart city and digital twin research depends.
In the School’s record of international engagement, FOSS4G now stands with IGLC32 and the 2026 Aga Khan Award for Architecture exhibition among the defining events hosted in this period. The record now forms part of an international footprint spanning conference chairing, keynotes, hosting and scientific committee service in 33 countries on six continents. For AUT, the week brought several hundred international specialists to City Campus and associated the University with open knowledge and digital equity. For students, it brought code sprints, workshops and community days onto their own campus, offering direct contact with the open source practice that increasingly underpins digital design and engineering. For the School, it opened relationships with developers, public agencies and companies who build the tools that councils, utilities and planners use every day, relationships that bear directly on the governance of digital twins that represent people as well as places.