[Board] OSGeo promotion / booth at FOSS4G, things to do

[Arnulf Christl (WhereGroup)]

Hi All,
with Ari's consent I forward a few of his (midnight) thoughts regarding
our presence at FOSS4G and general impressions to these lists for further
consideration. I think they are valuable to keep in the mind and improve
on in Sydney. Maybe you would want to add them to the lessons learned
Wiki?

Best regards,
Arnulf.

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: Re: Confirmation and Ping
From:    "Ari Jolma" <jolma at cc.hut.fi>
Date:    Wed, October 1, 2008 00:34
To:      "Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo)" <tmitchell at osgeo.org>
Cc:      "Jeroen Ticheler" <Jeroen at Ticheler.net>
         arnulf.christl at wheregroup.com
         board-priv at osgeo.org
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

The first thing that I usually need to tell people that come to the
booth (here and in the finnish GIS expo) is that OSGeo is an umbrella
organization, not a project itself but a cooperation effort between
projects. Thus it's a bit strange to have a booth when the whole
conference is supposed to be an OSGeo event. Yes, I think some things
could and should be done to make it a bit more clear that it really is
an OSGeo conference and event. And also that OSGeo is you, the community.

Also, there seems to be a need to think what the movement or OSGeo is
about, and educate people. I talked today with people from MapWindow
group who had questions about what it really means for a project to be
an OSGeo project - I wasn't even sure of all the answers I gave. Jeroen
talked about his talks with 52North, do they have a good idea what OSGeo
is about? In edu committee BOF I started to think; if the idea to
develop free material for GIS education, do we have a common
understanding of what free means (even the different licences in the
end) and what is the GIS we talk about (free GIS or GIS in general)?
Maybe this could be an explicit track or theme in the conference somehow?

Many things work and progress really well, but we have these challenges,
which are not anything negative but really the core issues of the whole
thing and reasons to exist. Somehow the OSGeo booth should reflect the
fact that it's not a booth but a meta booth.

Ari



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