[Board] FOSS4G North America 2013

[Peter Batty]

Cameron,

My thoughts are similar to Frank's. I certainly appreciate the due
diligence you are doing and it is good to know the worst case. But we need
to consider the likely case too, and I have spent a significant amount of
time talking to both NA and Nottingham teams and am very comfortable that
both events will be very successful in terms of serving the community and
will very likely both return some profit to OSGeo that we can use to
support other events in future and for other OSGeo activities.

Looking from another perspective, the FOSS4G North America conference has
already been widely publicized (see
http://foss4g-na.org/save-the-date-foss4g-north-america-2013/, widely
reposted elsewhere). If we choose not to provide this support then the team
will have to cancel the event, which I think will be seen to reflect very
negatively on OSGeo. Canceling one major planned event (Beijing) is bad
enough, canceling two within the space of a few months would really damage
our credibility.

You can argue various points about whether it should have been "announced"
before getting everything agreed, but we are where we are and I think no
matter how you spin it, many people would see it as another significant
setback for OSGeo if we didn't go ahead.

So please, let's just push on and approve this motion, and give both events
all the support we can from the board and the broader community. They will
both be very successful events like other FOSS4Gs before them.

Cheers,
    Peter.

On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 2:36 PM, Frank Warmerdam <warmerdam at pobox.com>wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 1:29 PM, Cameron Shorter
> <cameron.shorter at gmail.com> wrote:
> > From what I'm hearing, FOSS4G-NA have a maximum exposure of $50K, and
> OSGeo
> > have $84K, leaving $34K for FOSS4G-Nottingham. (Timing might be such that
> > this won't be quite as bad).
> > Steven, based upon this assessment, do you wish to state any objections
> > related to FOSS4G-NA?
>
> Cameron,
>
> For what it's worth, I do not believe that we need to
> restrict ourselves to only taking on risk where the worst
> case scenario on all fronts would consume our cash on
> hand.  We have sponsorship income, and can reduce other
> budgetary items if needed to bridge in a situation where
> we suffer significant conference losses.
>
> Of course it is still desirable to keep an eye out to mitigate
> worst case scenarios.
>
> I am comfortable that we can financially back the FOSS4G
> NA and FOSS4G Nottingham events.
>
> Best regards,
> --
>
> ---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
> 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
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