[North America] North American Chapter update

[Mark Lucas]

I still haven't given up on a North American conference for this year.

Ideally, I'd like to see OSGeo board approval on our path forward.  We have a face to face meeting of the OSGeo board scheduled for early February.  The goal is to get everyone on the same page for where we are going as an organization.

In private communications I feel that the majority of the board support a North American chapter and support annual regional events.  Before "officially" approving the North American chapter we need to put more effort into the official organization of the chapter and top level coordination with other chapters in the North American footprint.  It was felt that we should continue our conference planning efforts in parallel.

There are a number of opportunities for providing OSGeo support to events hosted by others:

Eclipse (Reston VA)  March 26-29th http://www.eclipsecon.org/2012/
Wherecon (Washington DC) Apr 10-12 http://www.wherecon.com/
Location Intelligence May (Washington DC) May 22,23 http://www.locationintelligence.net/
GITA hosted (Denver?)  www.gita.org
MIL-OSS (Orlando) October www.mil-oss.org
an event in parallel with USGIF Geoint (Orlando) October 8-11th http://geoint2012.com/

to name a few.  Clearly, it is to our benefit to have as much OSGeo exposure as we can at these events.

>From my point of view, I want to see some formal statement of backing from the OSGeo board before proceeding with an OSGeo branded conference.
It is my hope that we will get to that point with the f2f meeting.

In the meantime, we'll continue to move ahead with talks and planning.  I'll separately address moving ahead on organizational and chapter coordination in other list emails.

Mark









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