[Board] Teach-in 2009

[jo at frot.org]

On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 03:48:34PM -0700, Paul Ramsey wrote:
> > 1. Risk of withdrawal of resources from main conference
> 
> My anecdotal data thus far indicates that there are lots of North
> Americans who cannot, for regulatory reasons, travel to conferences
> outside the USA

Understood, but this doesn't alter my impression that 10K USD may not
be sufficient compensation to OSGeo, in exchange for the use of its brand 
and promotional support, for potential sponsorship and revenue lost to FOSS4G. 
O'Reilly do a lot of co-branded for-profit conferences and I'd be
curious to know what their basic rate for use of brand and online
promotion is.

> 2. Implicit change of Foundation conference policy
> I'm unsure I understand your point here. What do you think is the
> current policy, and what do you think it is being implicitly changed
> to?

Each year I've asked, if OSGeo can support several regional
conferences rather than putting resources into one big international one. 
Each year the response is, "People will travel to the One Big
Conference no matter where, to meet the tribes. Officially supporting
local conferences would dilute attendance and momentum at the
international one." 

But now North Americans are negatively effected, the policy is changed. 
(I include the OSBootCamp in this, as it's also been pitched as "for
those who can't make it to FOSS4G...")

> > 3. Impression of North American "cabal" bias in OSGeo strengthened.
> 
> I'm not sure that disallowing events in North America is a reasonable
> response to what is, anyways, only a matter of perception and not
> fact. 

This is reductive and is not what I suggested. I have stated that it
is important to try to counteract the social network bias towards NA,
for the sake of the impact that has on the global OSGeo community.
Thus treating this event as a "pilot" for Foundation-run rather than
privately-run events of the same kind, if the model works; working to
develop a blueprint for others to re-use. And re-examining the
conference policy to reflect that unserved-local-market,
high-travel-costs are everybody's concern.

> There is a wonderful "OSGeo Hacking" event going on in Italy
> next month.  FOSSGIS runs in Germany (and in the exclusionary German
> language) annually.  PgDay.it ran last year, including a geo track.

Yes, in addition to the Jornadas gvSIG and Jornadas SIG here in Spain,
the Free Map workshops and others put on with OSGeo India.

The difference is that none of these events have had direct support
from OSGeo - either in terms of contribution of Tyler's time and the
Foundation's financial management resources, as with this year's
Ottawa OSBootCamp - or in use of the name and conditions requested from
staff and directors. None of them AFAIK has been a for-profit venture. 

I don't have any problems with running a for-profit venture and I
appreciate your attempts to be very circumspect in presenting this to
the Board and scheduling to minimise clash with FOSS4G. I don't want to 
get into an argument, but I wouldn't be pressing these concerns if i wasn't 
pretty sure of their validity.

cheers,


jo
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