[Board] Activity update

[Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo)]

Hi all,
Here's a brief update for you about what I've been up to.

Location Intelligence conference
In April I attended this conference, at the event we had a good open  
source showing: Autodesk donated booth space, the booth had many  
visitors, four of us did presentations, and there was a good mixer  
discussion/social after the event that help people cross-pollinate  
with attendees from the AAG and Web 2.0 meetings happening nearby at  
the same time.
While in the San Francisco area I also met with several people from  
Autodesk, including their legal, marketing and education  
departments.  One of the more interesting areas was around  
educational material.  There is some potential that we could have  
access to their educational material for remixing with an open source  
curriculum.

MapServer Meeting, Brasil
The conference planning team flew me down to be the keynote speaker  
at this event.  They took me around to see several potential venues  
for hosting FOSS4G 2008 - they will submit a proposal - but even if  
they don't win their next event will likely have a broader mandate  
than just MapServer and probably bring in more than the 300  
participants they had this year.   There are also many interested in  
forming an OSGeo local chapter.  This is a very well organised group  
and was encouraging to see.
For more see: http://www.osgeo.org/tyler/brasil

OSGeo Journal
This effort has been the main use of my time over the past month.   
I'm editor in chief and was responsible for pulling together  
contributors, editors and much more.  In the end it took much more  
time than I had anticipated, largely due to my learning curve with  
the layout language and making some layout changes.  More volunteer  
editors in the future will help.  Many people are excited about this  
venue for promoting, teaching and communicating amongst the  
communities.  The Journal was released this week and has already over  
800 downloads in 2 days.
For more see: http://www.osgeo.org/journal/volume1

Website work
I've been working with Jeff Mckenna to get a file management tool up  
and running for his conference-related documentation.  Also I've  
implemented several website changes for handling/storing a document  
library.

Naturally there are also hundreds of emails and other conversations  
that I'm working with to help

Next up... charter membership nominations and voting, then board  
elections as well.
If you are considering resigning from the board and/or would like to  
put yourself up for re-election on the board, let me know.  That will  
save us from having to use a totally random methodology to remove  
some of you from the board.

Then I'm onto 501c3 prep and to get my head into fundraising mode.   
I'm not planning on any big trips during the rest of May/June so that  
I can focus on these items instead of worrying about event planning.   
I would like to take a week off in June for some holidays though.

Hope this helps,
Tyler