[OSGeo-Board] opening and organizing

[Frank Warmerdam]

Gary Lang wrote:
> " I'm not sure what it was that you are saying Tyler wanted to do.  "
> 
> He wanted to know what is going on and is having trouble tracking
> everything. Trying to divine the shape of OSGeo's overall activities
> from subscribing to mailing lists is time-consuming compared to looking
> at a simple list.

Gary,

Well, I would claim that a global task list would still not give a
straight forward sense of what the foundation is doing.  And I don't
find such things on the web sites of many other organizations.

I think, as has been mooted with Tyler, that an effort to summarize
important and interesting news to the discuss list and like to some sort
of web page is valuable and should be done.  But I don't think it ought
to take the form of some big task matrix.

And I would claim that whoever is going to do this will need to do
some research (ie. asking around, or subscribing or whatever) to build
it.

Generally speaking it is impossible to know what is going on in detail
in any large organization, be it a corporation, a foundation or a
ham radio club.

> This will be important for, among other things, promotion and funding
> activities. We are not going to get many sponsorship bites if interested
> parties need to spend that much time and effort seeing it it's worth it.
> They just won't take the time.

We will need to be prepared to "make a case" for sponsorship before we
start approaching organizations about it.  But these organizations aren't
going to be interested in whether we plan to be at Where 2.0, or how
progress is going on defining the types of foundation membership.  They
need a digested case for why they ought to sponsor.  They will also be
influenced by how visible we are in general, and how supportive they are
of our goals.

I would add I wasn't generally anticipating that the sponsors would
be searching us out.  I think we will need to actively solicit them
with the help of our membership and a detailed sponsorship program.

--

However, returning to the general point.  I am in favor of awareness
building.  I am against micro-managing committees or their task lists.
And I think we need to be realistic about how easy it will be to understand
everything the foundation is doing.

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