[Board] March/April update

[Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo)]

Hi all,
A few things to note from the past month.

* I took 7 days off due to being sick and tending to a sick family  
too.  Seems we're all recovered now.

* Compiling Annual Report. Lots of great reports from almost all  
projects and many local chapters.  A couple committee groups are  
still outstanding.  I have to write a couple still, others  
outstanding: Incubation, Systems, Website, Conference.  I'm working  
with Arnulf to get a Board level report too.
** http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Annual_Report_2008

* Journal - we also have a few journal articles going through our  
first ever attempt at peer review.  Still lots of opportunity if  
someone wants to help me run the Journal.

* FOSS4G 2009 is getting to the critical point for building up more  
sponsors as soon as possible.  If you have any leads for companies or  
organisations that would benefit from exhibiting or sponsoring,  
please let me or others on LOC know.  For some of you this might be  
the easiest way to help raise funds for OSGeo, since there are many  
clear ways that donors benefit from sponsoring FOSS4G.  It can be our  
major fundraiser for the year if we look at it that way - otherwise  
it can easily become a major cost item too!  I encourage you all to  
be looking for sponsors for the event and for OSGeo generally too.

* Summer of Code - SoC brought in as much funding last year as a  
supporting sponsorship ($10k).  I proposed a project for helping  
improve printing output, based on earlier wiki discussions with  
Markus, Wolf and others.  We have a student proposal based on it and  
I offered to help Wolf mentor.

* Finances - paid out some QGIS (hackfest) and GDAL (Toronto Code  
sprint) sponsorship funds.  Received sponsorship renewal from our  
friends at LizardTech.  Updating transactions, paying bills, etc.

* Marketing - supported our presence at American Association of  
Geographers (AAG) event, with our involvement led by Alex Mandel (aka  
wildint).  Used first professional produced brochure layout, among  
other things.   Our good first test case on using an exhibition  
package.  Result was really good and booth was very popular.  Next  
event to help with is Where 2.0.
** http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/marketing/brochures/draft_2009/ 
OSGeo_Brochure_1_flip.pdf

Looking forward to chatting on Friday.
Tyler