[Benchmarking] Rebooting the Benchmarking effort

[Jeff McKenna]

On 2013-09-04 10:02 AM, Arnulf Christl wrote:
> 
> Ah, seems like this whole thing is starting to work now. All my 
> earlier mails re. *doing* the work just evaporated unseen. :-)
> 
> I am sorry that my championing did not live up to your 
> expectations. But honestly, I do not believe that any champion 
> could actually get this done in their free time. I *do* believe 
> that this is something that an OSGeo employee could do. In short: 
> Funding comes through dedicated sponsorship which is invested into 
> someone organizing it. This can be a low profile position not an 
> exec like we had before. The code sprints is where the actual work 
> happens. Andrea suggested that the projects shoudl also get 
> something out of this, see his other mail.
> 
> This type of arrangement would also have the charm of actually 
> being able to give sponsors a very tangible ROI of their 
> sponsorship (something we are currently not really good at).
> 
> This will obviously need a lot of discussion on the board level I 
> just wanted to let the the idea fly here.
> 
> Cheers, Arnulf
> 
> 

Just seeing this message now Arnulf.  The problem is getting the
sponsors (someone's time to make those face-to-face visits with
sponsors, build those relationships).  OSGeo hasn't done a great job
with this, as it's just not our skillset.

But in general, I'm all for throwing funding at the benchmarking
exercise.  A nice slide addition (hint: the first 10 slides of the
last benchmarking presentation could fill lots of time during the town
hall intro:
http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/foss4g/benchmarking/wms/2011/presentation/)
could be a single slide of a list of ALL organizations that have been
ever participated, since 2007 (would be cool to see, and yes those are
Mapgears, US Army Corps, Gateway Geomatics, Refractions, OpenGeo,
Geosolutions, Cadcorp, ESRI, Erdas, etc. etc.)  They should be singled
out and thanked for their 'sponsorship', which it really was/is.

-jeff