[Board] F2F meeting request

[Michael P. Gerlek]

Scheduling it over a weekend would be fine with me, I sure we could arrange something.

_mpg


-----Original Message-----
From: fwarmerdam at gmail.com [mailto:fwarmerdam at gmail.com] On Behalf Of Frank Warmerdam
Sent: Monday, December 12, 2011 11:46 AM
To: mpg at flaxen.com
Cc: board at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [Board] F2F meeting request

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