[North America] North America conference discussion

[Mark Lucas]

I've been receiving a lot of good comments and have been asking that they be moved out to the list for broader discussion.

Most of the comments revolve around how to estimate the initial conference and set expectations properly.  Most of those recommendations encourage mitigation of risk and marketing the first conference as a start up event and essentially a launching pad for a much more aggressive 2013 conference.

To mitigate risk it appears that working with GITA in Denver, before or after another distinct GITA event in Apr / May would be best at minimizing the overall workload and financial risk.  I've reached out to Tyler, Peter, Dave and others as we have bounced ideas back and forth and modified the last conference spreadsheet to get an initial handle on overall budget.

The biggest driver is the estimated number of attendees.  Peter has provided survey information from the foss4g conference so that we could see what the interests, comments, and geographical distribution of the attendees were.  Current thinking seems to be settling around 200-300, possibly expanding to 500 attendees.

As we have always done, we also want to take advantage of other organizations and conferences to further spread our message.  The eclipse foundation, mil-oss, USGIF, and GITA are all potential collaborators in this and future activities.  MIL-OSS indicated that they could help organize a parallel track for the conference.  They typically attract around 100 people to each of their working groups. 

We have been in initial discussions with GITA and it appears there may be a straight forward plan to host our first event.  I'd like to see if we can continue and open up many of these discussions over the next week or so and make a decision to kick the effort off after the next board meeting on 8 Dec.  The timeframe is very short and we'd like to get sponsorship material and early signup rates out before the end of the year.


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