[OSGeo Africa] FOSSGIS-Africa conference updates

[Serena Coetzee]

Dear Tim,

great news that this is going ahead.  I would definitely like to be  
involved in the academic side of organizing things.  Would Ashley  
Gunter also be interested in this?  Should I join him to form an  
academic committee?  From the FOSS4G 2008 entries, it looked as if not  
too much is done on the software development side in academia in  
Africa. However, I think on the application side, there must be many  
stories to report.

In the mean time, I will try to find out more about how it is done at  
the German FOSSGIS and come up with more concrete suggestions.  
Although, the call for papers should probably be posted in February  
(already tight, considering the reviews that will have to be done).  
Did you have any such deadlines in mind already?

And I am sure that I will find students to help as volunteers at the  
event in exchange for free entry, for example.

Regards,
Serena Coetzee
Department of Computer Science
University of Pretoria
Pretoria, South Africa

Tel: +27 12 420 2547
Fax: +27 12 362 5188
Mobile: +27 82 464 4294

On 26 Jan 2010, at 15:11 , Tim Sutton wrote:

Hi All

A few weeks I posted to the list my interest in holding an
Africa-centric FOSSGIS get together this year. I received a very good
response with various offers for venues and assistance. Of the three
venues put forward I would like to use Monash University, Krugersorp,
South Africa since it offers everything we need:

- venue being donated
- sufficient labs and lecture rooms
- support from the staff in-situ
- good transport network

The Monash South Africa University campus web site is here:

http://www.monash.ac.za/

The venue was proposed by Ashley Gunter who is a lecturer at the  
university.

I know it would have been nice to hold the conference somewhere more
central in Africa so that those to the north dont need to travel too
far, but since this is going to be our first time I think it will
logistically be easier to organise the process if the venue is closer
to home.

I would very much like to make the entrance to the conference and
workshops free or very cheap. Currently our budget plan calls for a
registration fee of R500 per delegate and R1000 per workshop. We will
look at our options, but one great one would be to have a couple of
sponsors.

The german FOSSGIS conference keep costs down by avoiding expensive
things like fancy catering (they offer soup and bread at lunch and
tea/coffee/biscuits at tea breaks) and I am looking to emulate their
approach as much as possible.


So what next? Now is the time to put together an organising committee
and start promoting our conference.


If you would like to assist with the organisation, please contact me.
Also if you have contacts for publicising the conference please
forward the promotional materials on to them when we have them ready.

If you are an academic, please start thinking about what we could do
in terms of an academic track and make some proposals for suitable
people to review paper / poster submissions.

I am going to set up a wiki page and other similar resources over the
next week or two and we can use that as the basis for collaboration.

Best regards

-- 
Tim Sutton - QGIS Project Steering Committee Member (Release  Manager)
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Visit http://linfiniti.com to find out about:
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Skype: timlinux Irc: timlinux on #qgis at freenode.net
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