[North America] updated status 25 Nov 2011

[Mark Lucas]

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving!  I understand that in Canada it is held sometime in October, in the US it was yesterday.  In any case, it is a North American holiday and hope everyone enjoyed it.

There has been very constructive discussion on the various lists related to the North America chapter, ideas for an annual regional conference, and what can be done to assist the international event in Beijing this year.  I think most of the questions are being addressed adequately and I sense that we are headed for approving the NA chapter at the next board meeting the first part of December.  If we have missed anything, or anyone has questions, pleased let us know so we can do our best to address any concerns and promote good ideas.

I'm also very encouraged to see recent discussion on establishing other chapters - both local and regional in Asia and Europe.  All of this serves to get more contributors involved and empowered.

There have also been a number of side threads, google hangouts, and irc chats throwing ideas around related to the regional conference.  Some of the initial conference thoughts were posted to the wiki.  Thanks to Arnulf, Frank, Peter, Tyler, Dave, and others for their advice and experience.

As stated, the initial and primary focus of the chapter is to establish an annual regional conference in North America.  I'll volunteer to be conference lead to get this off the ground.  We think we can leverage the foss4g 2011 success and run the first OSGeo/foss4g North American Regional conference in the Spring using GITA.  GITA successfully ran the 2011 conference for us.  We will probably combine resources and leverage off of another venue that GITA is planning for Denver in the April/ May timeframe.  Our conference would be branded and run as a separate event.  Still a ton of details and discussions to go through, but it seems to us that we can take advantage of the recent experience and expertise, duplicate what worked in the past, and improve on other areas with manageable risk.  As all of this begins to take shape we'll post online.

If you are interested please get involved and contribute.  The best way to influence things is to lead from the front.

have a great weekend.

Mark


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