[Aust-NZ] Belated lessons learned from WALIS conference

[Cameron Shorter]

The West Australian Land Information Systems (WALIS) conference held in 
Perth, Australia in March 2008 attracted ~ 800 people, largely from 
geospatial government departments and utilities.

As OSGeo, we set up a stand and an afternoon stream of presentations 
dedicated to Open Source, Open Standards, Open Architecture, Open Data 
and Open Communities attracted ~ 150 people. This was in addition 
presentations about the WALIS Spatial Data Infrastructure offering WMS 
and WFS services, much of which is based upon Open Source.

http://www.walis.wa.gov.au/forum/assets/2008/proceedings/open-standards-open-source-open-data.ppt

http://www.walis.wa.gov.au/forum/assets/2008/proceedings/readyforprimetime.ppt

Shirts
We wore business shirts, light blue with a green OSGeo text and logo on 
the breast pocket. Our aim was to present a professional image to Open 
Source. Show that Open Source has commercial organisations backing it 
and we can provide the professional support you expect when you pay big 
dollars for software. I believe dressing like commercial organisations 
with quality shirts instead of t-shirts helps act as "hacker 
deodourant". We have a box of these shirts now which will be used for 
other Australian conferences.

Fliers
We have fliers printed a year ago which cover projects and committees as 
things stood a year ago. There are around 15 different flients. These 
were mildly useful. If someone asked about education, we could hand them 
an education flier. Some people picked up all the fliers, but I'm not 
sure they were likely to read them afterwards. Mostly, I found that the 
fliers were too targeted at technology and not at business problems. 
People come to you with business problems and want to know if Open 
Source can help. "I want to publish to the web". "I analyze data and 
want to automate it".

We only had fliers for OSGeo graduating/graduated packages, but what I 
really wanted was to show a stack of Open Source GIS software, and there 
are a few key holes in the OSGeo stack. In particular, PostGIS and 
Geoserver are not OSGeo projects yet. And apart from GRASS, we don't 
have fliers for the desktop clients: gvSIG or qGIS, JUMP derivatives, or 
uDig.

What would be very useful is a diagram of the Open Source Stack, and 
some honest feature comparison tables, which acknowledges both what open 
source does and doesn't cover well.

Signage:

We have an "OSGeo" sign, but few people know what "OSGeo" mean. Many are 
still unclear about the meaning of "Open Source". I think we'd have 
better luck with:
"OSGeo: Quality Open Source Geospatial Software,"

Demos:
People like to touch and feel the applications. This is something we 
could improve upon by installing a stack of OSGeo software. A Live CD 
would be good.

Live CDs:
I haven't used one yet, but I reckon if we gave away live CDs of OSGeo 
Software, they would go like hot cakes.

Costs:
We have started asking, and have received free stand registration for 
the OSGeo Foundation.

-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Systems Architect
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

Think Globally, Fix Locally
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