[North America] North America conference discussion

[Paul Ramsey]

Very excited about this, love Denver.
P.

On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 4:31 AM, Mark Lucas <mlucas17 at mac.com> wrote:
> 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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