[Board] Re: Title for opening plenary

[Arnulf Christl]

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Peter Batty wrote:
> Hi Arnulf, sorry for the short notice but I wondered if you could give me a
> title for your talk in the opening session. I guess "The State of OSGeo"
> would be an option, but let me know what you prefer. And perhaps a short
> abstract, a couple of sentences would be fine. If there's any way of getting
> this to me tomorrow (Thursday) that would be much appreciated.
> 
> Cheers,
>     Peter.

Hi Peter,
"The State of OSGeo" if fine.

One idea might be to present the OSGeo "business plan" for 2012? We do
not have it yet but we will have one in time for FOSS4G.


Board,
I include you to give your opinion. This is a first idea for my FOSS4G
keynote as president of OSGeo and I would like to get broad feedback and
not do something specific of my own (this will happen automagically
during the talk anyway... :-) This is really on short notice so please
hit reply and then take a minute to consider and comment.

Thanks.



Now - what abstract could that be? I'll give it a spontaneous try:

OSGeo has come of age. The structure of the foundation is clear and our
mission and goals are defined. We have achieved what we set out to do,
everything runs smoothely. Sure - lots of things can still be improved
and there is a never ending stream of great new ideas but all in all we
are headed in the right direction and - humbly - doing a great job.

Now what? This is a question that an organisation as a system cannot
answer on its own. It needs to be worked out by the community supporting
the organization. And this community is getting diverser by the day. The
initial focus was set by the developers of well known FOSS4G projects,
mostly supported by small companies and power users. Over the past years
more and more interest was signalled by larger organizations, both from
the public sector and industry. But OSGeo has not yet formed itself to
be able to address their needs. One question we may (or must) ask
ourselves is whether we want to address the needs of these larger
organizations. Nota Bene: this is not people anymore but full fledged
systems and thus asks a lot of different things of us.

This presentation will show several paths to evolve OSGeo and intends to
trigger some thought in you (the attendees of this conference) as to
what you want OSGeo to become. We are a collective of experts in a small
but deep niche, the geospatial domain. And everyone is watching us as
the relevance of location - Geo - and Open Source is becoming more and
more obvious for so many processes.




Too long? Think a different message would make more sense? Feel free to
amend, hack, cirticize or just take it as is.

Best regards,
Arnulf

- --
Nothing makes sense, except we make it.
http://www.metaspatial.net

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