[North America] Initial thoughts on the first North America Regional conference

[Mark Lucas]

I'd like to begin the discussion on organizing a North America Regional conference this year.

I suggest for the first NA event we take a fairly conservative approach and go out of our way to support and not dilute the efforts required to pull off a successful FOSS4G 2012 Beijing event.  Statistics clearly show that most of the annual attendees for any given event come from within the region where the conference is being held.  But there is also the amount of contributor bandwidth that is needed to successfully organize these events.  In that light, here are some initial suggestions:

1) Deconflict the schedule.   Perhaps schedule our regional conference around May (I believe Beijing is Sep)
2) Use GITA with our collective experience of the Denver FOSS4G 2011 event to minimize risk (outsource much of the organization and logistics to GITA again)
3) Plan for a smaller, less complex event (not as many parallel tracks, maybe in conjunction with another planned activity)
4) Plan on using some of the profits to sponsor OSGeo. 
5) Do what we can to feed the larger FOSS4G Beijing event

Then we can plan a larger conference early 2013 for North America - we'll have more time, resources, and experience under out belt

Of course, taking this approach shortens the timeline for getting to the first conference, so we will need to get going.  I plan on discussing this with Peter Batty (ran the foss4g 2011 conference) and Jeff McKenna (helped organize the last one and leading the efforts for Beijing coordination) to get their input.

I'd like to hear everyone's initial comments on this approach.

Mark





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