[Board] OSGeo board, F2F Meeting in India

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Fri, Feb 05, 2010 at 08:57:15AM +0900, Jeff McKenna wrote:
> Tyler Mitchell (OSGeo) wrote:
> Hi Tyler,
>
> Thanks for summarizing.  I think we will miss a great opportunity to  
> promote OSGeo in India (isn't this the main goal of the Foundation?); 

If the main goal of the foundation is to promote OSGeo in India,
I wasn't aware of it.

Perhaps you mean:
 "The main goal of the Foundation is to support OSGeo in developing
  nations." I also don't agree with this.

Our homepage says:
"Our goal is to encourage the use and collaborative development of
community-led projects." 

I think this is more realistic.

Anything that costs OSGeo money -- like funding a trip to India for
the board of directors -- would take funds away from other things
that money can be spent on. If we imagine that OSGeo is to fund
the travel of the Board to India for a F2F meeting, the costs are 
pretty large. Even assuming a conservative estimate for travel from
a hub, you're talking about flights being something like 
$1500 per person. Adding in hotel for 1-2 nights is not free, but
we'll assume that someone can put us up. 

So, with 9 directors, that's $13k; this is ignoring the fact that some
of the directors may also be taking time off, or unable to do consulting
work during that time, resulting in personal lost income. 

If we imagine that that money is spent instead on funding the OSGeo
India conference, I think that the end result of giving that 
$10000 to the OSGeo India group would be more beneficial to the efforts
of OSGeo overall.

I don't want to condescend here, but unless you imagine each board 
member supporting their own travel, even assuming that some majority
of them could attend without personal sacrifice, just doesn't make
sense outside of events that some number of the board members will
already be attending... like FOSS4G.  

> I do have another idea:
>
> - each FOSS4G annual event must include a Board F2F, and this  
> requirement should be added to the FOSS4G request for hosting, as the  
> AGM is already included. Each Board member's travel expenses will be  
> covered for each Board F2F meeting (meaning: travel to FOSS4G)

> To me this makes sense.

Yes; although I might change "will be covered" to "will be covered
in case of hardship". Some people have employers who would be willing
to cover a board member's travel -- as MetaCarta has for me in the past,
for example. In a situation where a board member would be paying out of
pocket, I think it makes sense to go ahead and support them with travel,
and this includes the (common) situation of having a board member acting
primarily as a consultant/contractor. But in a situation where an
employer is willing to cover that cost, I think that it's reasonable to
take advantage of it -- a donation to support OSGeo, sort of. :)

Any situation where a number of board members are likely to attend,
I think it makes sense to encourage a full F2F board meeting where
costs aren't prohibitive. (For example, it might make sense to
travel to India if 3 or 4 board members *already* planned on attending,
and were funded out of other organizations within India, for example.)
This will likely always be true with FOSS4G. However, making the funds
available for all of the board -- or even 75% of it -- to travel
to a location where the other 25% will be is probably not reasonable. 

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta