[Board] Some thoughts on how to approach the meeting in Seattle

[Peter Batty]

I wanted to start a bit of discussion on how best to approach the meeting
in Seattle, and throw out a few suggestions and questions. This isn't
something you can easily just stick in the wiki, I think we need a bit more
discussion on the overall approach.

One question is what are our objectives for the meeting. I would say a key
one is for us to come to a clearer consensus as a board on what are the
activities that the foundation wants to carry out. I'm sure we will
continue to have a range of opinions of course, but unless we can get some
pretty good agreement on some number of core activities that are (or
aren't) part of our mission then it's hard for us to be very effective.

We've been wrestling with wildly divergent opinions on things like do we
need paid staff, do we need to raise more funds than we have been doing,
and if so what's the value proposition that we offer sponsors / members
etc. But we can't hope to answer those questions unless we have a clearer
view of what activities we want to carry out.

One good starting point I think would be to make sure that we all agree on
our high level mission statement, which is as follows:

OSGeo was created to support the collaborative development of open source
geospatial software, and promote its widespread use.

I understand that was discussed at some length by the previous board, and I
think it's a good high level description that I definitely support. So
hopefully this would be relatively easy to all agree on (famous last
words!). But it would at least be good to start with something we all agree
on!

Then we could logically break the discussion into two major areas:
supporting the collaborative development of open source geospatial
software, and promoting its widespread use.

In terms of supporting development, we have various established processes
(incubation etc) that are relevant here. Many of those I think work pretty
effectively through volunteers and probably don't need much if any funding
(but it's possible some areas might benefit from funding / staff, need to
consider in more detail).
Another thing we *could* do to support development is help fund / sponsor /
underwrite code sprints - we had quite a bit of discussion around this in
regard to the upcoming code sprint, but would be good to discuss further
and try to establish what we would like to do in this area going forward
(more, less, something similar?). Clearly this is an area where more
funding would enable us to do more.
I'm sure there's quite a list of things people can add in this area.

As I've mentioned, I think there's a lot more we could do in the area of
promotion of open source geospatial. I think there are a lot of potential
activities here that are common across projects, and are also common across
different parts of the world (I don't buy the argument that all the "real
work" should be done in chapters and nothing at the global level). Some
things I think would be very valuable to promote use of open source include:
- Create "success stories" about how organizations have used open source
geospatial software, publicize these, and make sure they're easy to find
(this is a good example I think where work like this could be run at the
international level, the local chapters could take this material and
translate it / present it appropriately for their region)
- Material answering common questions newcomers have about open source -
how do you get support, what do the licenses mean, etc etc. We have a good
amount of this from various sources both inside the OSGeo community and
from the broader open source community, but it isn't (I don't think)
collected together and easily accessible from our web site
- Material on the business case and benefits of open source
- Overviews of all the OSGeo projects to help guide people to the right
places to look for more details
- Help organize / coordinate events - there is certainly a big discussion
here about how much we do and in what form, and what is the split between
the global organization and local chapters (it would make sense for most of
the execution of local events to be done at the chapter level). But I think
there is a lot of scope for materials, templates, advice, lists of
potential speakers, conference web site infrastructure, etc to be provided
by global.
- Supporting a program to grow use of open source geospatial in education -
ESRI has been very aggressive in this area, so most people who study GIS in
college just know ESRI.
- Other marketing initiatives like getting articles placed in publications,
doing interviews with media, sponsoring (non OSGeo) events, advertising.

etc etc - just wanted to put some initial thoughts out. I think that quite
a number of things in the promotion section are ones where you can make a
good case that you could do significantly more if you have some funding and
paid staff. But unless we have this sort of wish list and some agreement on
which items are more important and which less important, we can't really
have sensible discussion on staff and funding etc.

So back to the structure of the meeting. One option might be to have a
couple of sessions on these two main areas that I mentioned, maybe one on
Saturday morning and one Saturday afternoon. For each one you could have a
structure something like:

1. Brainstorm and generate list of items we are doing or might possibly
want to do. At this stage not debating in detail or rejecting ideas, just
getting a list of things for consideration. Maybe 30 minutes?
2. Work through the list, discuss each item in more detail, decide if it's
something we would like to do if we had the resources, or if it's out of
our scope. Discuss what we would need to do it - volunteers only, part time
or full time staff (with what skills), funding - rough ideas of order of
magnitude. Maybe 2 hours?
3. Go through list after discussing all items and assign some sort of
priority (maybe just high, medium, low). Another 30 minutes?

Once we had these lists with priorities and order of magnitude efforts, we
could try to look at an overall plan to say here's what we could do if we
were operating at various annual budget levels - $50K, $100K, $200K, $500K,
whatever makes sense.

Then when we had an idea of what sort of budget(s) we would need to support
different types of activities, we could discuss possible means of
fund-raising - sponsorship / membership, events, etc. I know we haven't
been as successful at getting sponsors in the past as we might have hoped,
but I think a big element of that is not having a clear story on what they
are getting for their money. If we can clearly say here are the activities
you would be supporting with your funds and how they will benefit the open
source community and the projects you use, then I think we could be much
more successful in signing up members (and this is another area to consider
having a staff person to drive that, who gets paid based on how successful
he or she is in raising funds). And we should discuss events too - raising
money from events has been a contentious topic, but I don't think anyone is
advocating that generating funds should be the sole reason for an event. I
think FOSS4G in Denver showed that you can run an event that is well
received as valuable to the community, and also generates some funds to
support other activities of the foundation that benefit the community.
Those two aims don't have to be mutually exclusive.

I think that's enough for this evening. I think something like I've laid
out here could be a reasonable structure for Saturday and maybe some of
Sunday morning. But other suggestions more than welcome of course, I'm just
trying to get the ball rolling.

Cheers,
    Peter.
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