[Board] Teach-in 2009

[jo at frot.org]

On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 04:05:19PM -0700, Paul Ramsey wrote:
> If we were so interested in having a low-cost "meeting of the tribes",
> order of the day #1 would be locating it centrally in either Europe or
> North America, full-stop-say-no-more. After that, discussions about
> reducing the fee basis might be rationally worth listening to.

So this is a very rational conference policy consideration, *if* we
are committed to One Annual Central Meeting. 

> As it stands, the fee basis is still 50% of any other international
> technology conference I have seen (Where, Geoweb, Geotec, ESRI, etc).

These are all in North America and what makes them "international" is
marketing, and not being in non-English. They're also proprietary /
industry oriented conferences; not really comparing like with like.
Where and the other ORA conferences are very generous both with free
speaker attendance and free passes for "desirable" developers, free
exhibition stalls for open source projects, etc.

1000+ person, internationally attended FOSS conferences which are free
of cost include FOSDEM and LibreSoftwareMeeting (dual English/French) 

> > A viable model used by FOSSGIS has been to charge for workshops and
> > offer a free conference in the days following.
> 
> I'm not sure what makes FOSSGIS any more viable than FOSS4G, since
> both have been raging successes thus far.

As you point out in your proposal, rising travel costs due to fuel
price increases mean that more people can't afford to get to FOSS4G.
AFAIK there were about half the number of speaker proposals this year
compared to last year, and while we all hope for the contrary, it
seems likely that attendance numbers will drop a bit compared to last year.

And given there were a lot of mitigating factors, the fact that only
one local group put together a FOSS4G bid for 2009 is not terrifically
encouraging - "volunteers bust a gut and burn out, conference professionals
with no prior FOSS or GIS connections receive community funds, lots of
committed developers can't afford to attend" won't scale much further. 

> > This "training" could be seen as a good chance to pilot a better model
> > for FOSS4G.
> 
> Since the rights to the name "OSGeo Teach In" necessarily are going to
> be controlled by the title organization, this is indeed a no risk
> opportunity to test a new model.

Right now OSGeo could afford to take the risk, especially where a 
back-of-the-envelope suggests 100K profit - and as OSGeo not-for-profit
the proceeds of your last year's success have to be spent, no?

Okay, enough of me banging on, i would much prefer to hear what others think, 
particularly others involved in organising future FOSS4Gs and managing
the conference committee's activities.

cheers,


jo
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