Potential for an Incubation Sprint / OSGeo meetup

[Jo Walsh]

dear Board,

I wanted to add an item to the agenda for this week; the possibility of 
an OSGeo meetup for protagonists of the projects in Incubation in June.
Nothing is as momentum-building as getting people together face to face.

I saw that Chris brought up the idea of an Incubation Sprint at the
fourth meeting; I'd like to fill in a bit of detail on the event
planned in New York on the third weekend in June, and how it might work 
well as an extra reason for bringing OSGeo people together.

Where We Are is an event connecting people who are working on civic
information systems, public networks, located media and transportation 
ecology. It's a workshop / microconference / brainstorm event, 
between 2 to 4 dozen people for the weekend of the 17th and 18th June, 
and a public presentation, demo and discussion evening, likely to be on
Monday 19th. One aim is to document what happens there as a process, 
so that it can be easily reproduced in other places.
http://whereweare.net/ 

A Incubation/Stack Sprint could begin on the Thursday or Friday of
that week, and run through into the weekend. TOPP might be able to host
this, also potential academic venues. It would represent an opportunity
for projects in Incubation to work together on OSGeo hosted
applications, and to connect with people nearby who have unusual data 
sources and interesting use cases for open source geospatial software.
It could be a good publicity opportunity for OSGeo as well.

This happens to be the weekend after Where 2.0, so people who are
travelling a long way for that, might be able to stop over on the
way back. It could also be a lot of fun to plan a "parallel sprint" 
in Europe that could connect to FOSS4G bootstrapping meetings too. 

But if this is an idea the rest of the Board would be interested in
supporting, then the main question I have would become more pragmatic: 
Is there potential financial resource within OSGeo to support travel 
expenses to more meetings this year? Would this be a balancing act at best?

(I was interested to hear of 3 board members on the same panel today
at http://www.locationintelligence.net/agenda/ , I hope the advocacy
went well and that LI was a good thing for the Cause, I'd love to hear
more feedback about the crowd's reaction there, between the 3 of you
there must be a very convincing case for "Why Should the CXO Care
About Open Source Geospatial Products?")

warm regards,


jo