[Board] ED Update

[Tyler Mitchell]

Hi,
Here are a few things I've been up to over the past week or two.

-Financial - Working with Ken Tamura (Autodesk) to help hammer out  
needs for 501c3 application.  He's been very helpful and given me  
lots of to think about.  In the end there will likely need to be an  
updated budget that shows real planned expenditures and related  
revenue to cover these expenses for 2007.  I've started to take a  
stab at this and will put it by you.  For example consider the binary  
stack project in the budget - will it start?  If so, where will funds  
come from?  These are some of the questions we'll need to address and  
to adjust the budget accordingly for our application.  More to come...

-Charter Member Nominations - I've been coordinating and tracking all  
the nominations - we've got some great choice!  The nomination period  
has closed and we have over 35 nominees:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/New_Member_Nominations
I have a few more that I am trying to confirm.  Then I will post the  
rationales of nomination for each nominee so charter members can  
review, discuss and then vote on their choice.  This will likely  
start sometime next week depending on how soon the remainder of  
nominees can be confirmed.  The process will last for 10 days  
according to our bylaws.

-Journal development - We've start to solicit and collect material  
for the next issue of the journal.  Also we have worked to find a  
good solution to handle translated versions of the journal.  The  
French (aka Francophone) chapter of OSGeo has been a good testbed for  
this.  It's really encouraging to by engaging with them.

-Language barriers - this is becoming an interesting item to watch.   
As you already know there there are several local chapters that use  
different languages.  There are even some initiatives that I have  
watched develop in one group (i.e. Spanish chapter) without other  
committees like EduCom knowing, even though their share mandates to  
do some things (i.e. develop free gis book).  It's really neat to see  
momentum picking up outside of the English discussion channels.   
There is a good challenge for OSGeo to find innovative ways of  
bridging the language barrier.  WebCom has been discussing  
translation issues a fair bit as well.

That's all for now,  more later.  I'm hoping to take a couple days  
off over the next week, but should still be accessible via email.

Hope all is well with you,
Tyler