[OSGeo-Board] Board meeting April 7

[Frank Warmerdam]

Jo Walsh wrote:
> I would also be +1 with this, and would like to collect more thoughts
> on middle ground between "sprint" on short-term goals (Incubation) and
> longer-term ones (pilot projects that would benefit from
> infrastructure already in place) and where the middle ground can be.

Jo,

In my mind a sprint should have pretty concrete goals going in, and
should require the dedicated togetherness in order to reach agreement,
often involving substantial compromise.  (at least a policy sprint,
as opposed to a code sprint).

It seems to me that discussions of pilot projects that would benefit
from the infrastructure in place is a much more open ended sort of
thing that does require a huddle to break through objects to common
agreement.  Well, I guess if we had a bunch of candidate projects,
and limited resources and we wanted to pare it down to one or two
we would do - but that we could get wide involvement in that might
justify something like a sprint.

But to be honest, I'm not sure what sorts of pilot projects you are
thinking of, nor where their would fit in our already stated mission
and goals.

I do hope we will have good brainstorming opportunities at OSGeo.
But to me, paying for a sprint (in money *and* time for travel) we
need a pretty compelling case.

> Nod, I'm writing up the Geodata Committee meeting / activity summary
> today, and I'll try to make it a more discursive one than the previous, 
> and forward it here. I'm sure that everyone within OSGeo would be
> interested in reading committee reports, and commenting on them. 
> Sending meeting reports to the discuss list doesn't seem appropriate
> to me, perhaps I'm wrong about that. Ideally this should be part of the
> flow of something that we are doing anyway, not an extra 'reporting'
> workload. 

Why do you think sending committee reports to the osgeo discuss list
would be inappropriate?  To me that seems like a good idea.  As long
as they aren't sent out more often than every week or two it isn't
adding to much to the traffic on the discuss list.  The discuss list
is primarily subscribed to by people with an expressed interest in
following OSGeo activities fairly closely.

And it would be a better use of the bandwidth than the continued planning
for a pub meeting in the UK!

I certainly like the reports going to discuss better than them somehow
just being for the board.  That would likely feel like "reporting overhead"
to the committees, while sending it to discuss is likely to generate
additional interest, support and membership in their activities.

> I had a quick look at the Committee pages on the wiki, thinking (after
> a brief IRC discussion with Frank about this earlier) to drop a quick
> email to the Committee chairs and remind them about this. Then I
> realised that apart from the Education committee, which hasn't kicked
> off its activities yet (that I am aware of) all the other Committee
> chairs are Board members or are lurking on the Board list anyway. 

Yes, we are failing ourselves as it were. :-)

> Perhaps, as Tyler suggested, a nag-bot would do this job as well as a
> human would :)

I am personally quite opposed to automated nag-bots.  To me they get to
be just that much more spam.  I would prefer a polite human solicitation.
I think DanielB was tasked with encouraging the committee reporting?

Best regards,
-- 
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGF, http://osgeo.org