[Aust-NZ] FOSS4G-SOTM-Oceania: conference length and dates

[Rob Atkinson]

These things are always balancing acts - maybe its worth polling around
what people want to get out of things.

As a user or service provider or developer - i want to see trends - who is
using what and where the action is.
As a developer i want to highlight what and why and hopefully find users
and stop other re-inventing a wheel and becoming contributors
As a user I want to know how people are using tools and who might be
available to provide support for particular aspects
As a service provider i want warts-and-all experiences of deployment with
real lessons being shared

Having to choose between 10 long workshops run once, or  5 short workshops
run for 20% of the time and repeated - the latter - people can always
organise in depth training sessions, but FOSS4G should be about visibility
into the broader community. Employers might want to send to a detailed
course in a specific tech - so longer workshops before and after - bit not
organised by committee (but maybe with bundled entry to FOSS4G )?

2c...

Rob



On Wed, 13 Dec 2017 at 08:40 Cameron Shorter <cameron.shorter at gmail.com>
wrote:

> My thoughts on the first regional FOSS4G conference (in a long while) is
> that the primary goal is to make sure it is successful. With FOSS4G 2009 we
> over-estimated the number of attendees by close to a factor of 2. There
> were multiple reasons for this [1], but a key lesson was to make sure the
> conference goals are achievable and sustainable.
>
> As such, I'd err on selecting shorter, lower cost, lower barrier to entry
> (which results in being more selective of presentations and providing less
> higher quality presentations rather than more). I'd prefer to be sold out
> rather than having a conference full of empty seats.
>
> Lets see how many people we can attract into the conference in the first
> year before over-committing. We can build up numbers in following years.
>
> Cheers, Cameron
> [1] https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_Lessons_Learned
>
>
> On 13/12/17 8:24 am, John Bryant wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> At our upcoming committee meeting, we'll hopefully come to some kind of
> decision on:
>
>    - conference length (for the 'conference' component, exclusive of
>    pre-conf workshops and post-conf code sprint/hackathon/mapathon)
>    - conference dates
>
> Discussion around length, so far, has focused on 2 options, either one day
> or two (for a total event length of either 3 or 4 days).
>
> My personal preference would be to see two days for the conference proper,
> as I think with both FOSS4G and SOTM components, and a broad region
> (Oceania), there is the potential for a lot of content... I think one day
> wouldn't be enough time to cover it without spreading across too many
> competing streams/sessions.
>
> One argument for one day is that it would be less of an organisational
> burden, which is a fair point.
>
> Surely there are other arguments for one or the other option, or perhaps
> even additional options that haven't come up... it would be great to have
> some input on this mailing list before we meet next week to make a decision.
>
> Thoughts?
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Aust-NZ mailing listAust-NZ at lists.osgeo.orghttps://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/aust-nz
>
>
> --
> Cameron Shorter
> Technology Demystifier, Learnosity
> Open Technologies Consultant
>
> M +61 (0) 419 142 254 <0419%20142%20254>
>
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