[Board] F2F meeting request

[Frank Warmerdam]

On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 11:17 AM, Michael P. Gerlek <mpg at flaxen.com> wrote:
> Having voted down Mark's motion, I feel we need to quickly provide the support and backing required to resolve the question of the NA chapter and conference.  And I continue to think a f2f meeting of the board, as discussed at our meeting in Denver, would resolve this and some of the other long-term issues we have.

Michael,

Somewhat like Daniel, I think the NA chapter community needs to gel a bit
and self-clarify before it is approved as a chapter.  I don't see that the board
has a large role in this.

There is certainly an outstanding question whether we want a NA
conference to be an act of OSGeo global or a more locally organized
event and to some extent this is something the board needs to decide.
I'm personally in favor of it organizing locally rather than being a direct
act of the board or conference committee.


> I propose two days during the week of January 23rd, using a hotel at the Seattle airport as the venue.

I'm afraid I do not have any vacation days available for such a
meeting, and if I did, I'd be holding them for vacationing with
my children.

I still feel we haven't exhausted less demanding means of
working through some issues and I suspect some issues
are not going to ever achieve a strong consensus.

I know some board members feel we need to dig deep
and come up with a common understanding of where
OSGeo is going.  I don't actually feel this is necessary and
to a large extent I feel that OSGeo will be the sum of
what it's devotees make it by pursuering their passions.

That said, I would like us to consider where we can apply
the modest capacity of the foundation (primarily finanical)
to support efforts that are of particular strategic value.

For me, three forks along this line that might be useful are:

1) Providing support for folks to speak on behalf of the
foundation at events of various kinds.  Roughly this is
the ambassadorial role.  We are certainly dependent on
volunteers to actually fill this sort of role effectively.

2) Providing support for marketing efforts.  Mostly I see
this as funding production and provision of materials
including flyers, live DVDs and such for chapters to offer.
This would be under the administration of the marketting
committee.

3) Direct support of packaging the OSGeo suite for
strategic platforms.  To me the best leverage for this
is the OSGeo4W package and I would love to see
something similar for the Mac.  I would like to be able
to provide modest financial support for a paid
integrator/tester/packager/documenter to push
OSGeo4W forward.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Software Developer