[Board] Some food for thought from Directions magazine ahead of our board meeting

Thu Jan 5 10:45:15 PST 2012

Nicolas wrote:

> Would OSGeo just be the same today without OpenGeo's numerous code contributions and sponsorships ?

I'm not sure I follow this. My answer to your question would be "of course not": employees of OpenGeo have written a lot of good code and have done a lot of market education about open source.  But the same argument could be made for the MapServer gang, which doesn't have a single corporate entity behind it.

> i really think that some more energy, fundings and promotion should go to the OSGeo coding projects themselves 

> (and also to OSGeo marketing and Web presence, but this is another point i won't dive in now).

And this is where it gets hard :-(

Yes, we want to support the developers, and the marketing, and the web - and also free data, and open educational curricula, and.

But of course we can't do everything, and of course every member of OSGeo has their own areas of importance, so somehow the Board needs to prioritize.  I feel that's what we board members were elected to do.

Some of my own factors for prioritizing include:

- what can the Foundation do really well using its unique resources? (e.g. using volunteers)

- what are other groups overlap with what we could do? (e.g. OpenGeo developing GeoServer software or GitHub providing code hosting)

- what would areas would potential sponsors be willing to provide money for? (e.g. raising money to buy advertising space in a magazine is likely harder than raising money to improve the OSGeo4W packaging)

-mpg

From: nicolas bozon [mailto:nicolas.bozon at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, January 05, 2012 10:25 AM
To: board at lists.osgeo.org
Cc: Jo Cook; christopher.schmidt at nokia.com; mpg at flaxen.com
Subject: Re: [Board] Some food for thought from Directions magazine ahead of our board meeting

Hi Board, all

I fully agree with Chris here also.

But i don't with saying that OpenGeo/OSGeo comparison is just a distraction, with or without the DirectionMag kind of buzz. I am not speaking about the namings here.

In fact, i think it should be just part of the brainstorming on new OSGeo directions, and may be governance, the Board and the Foundation is looking for, now.
Would OSGeo just be the same today without OpenGeo's numerous code contributions and sponsorships ?
Would some of the Foundation projects be such efficient, popular, and used worldwide for personal, research or business use ?
.org, .com or even .biz, i think one can easily admit that they are one of the ***'businesses'*** that most contributed back to geospatial open source software projects till now. 

Why some people may be confused about the differences between the two .orgs, may be just because OpenGeo is just focussed on improving geospatial open source software Projects (leading to profit or not i guess). I don't personnaly think this is what OSGeo fully did in the recent times, at least not for all projects, incubated, in incubation, externals or relatives.

Back to previous emails, i really think that some more energy, fundings and promotion should go to the OSGeo coding projects themselves (and also to OSGeo marketing and Web presence, but this is another point i won't dive in now). To help the Projects grow, spread, and even work together at times maybe, and this, whatever the tribe is. Code Sprints aren't sufficent for this according to me (also because teams have to pay to improve their software), and i think the more fundings the Foundation could get, the more the OSGeo Projects should get some real help, in any possible ways.

Only my 2 cents

Best,

Nick

2012/1/5 Michael P. Gerlek <mpg at flaxen.com>

The string "OpenGeo", unfortunately, does sound very similar to "OSGeo" and that they are both nonprofit dot-orgs makes it even more confusing for outsiders to keep straight.  And many times I've had to explain to people that OSGeo is not the same as OGC, especially since I've been involved in both groups.  And I'm old enough to recall the discussions +5 years ago in Chicago about what to name ourselves, and whether "open" + "geo" was simply too generic and too close to OGC.

But all three organizations have existed peacefully for some years now, and so that's all water under the bridge.  Peter's mail is a great start towards what we all need to focus on: let us refine our mission and goals to reflect the activities the our foundation should and can support, and decide as well how much effort we'd like to spend on publicizing that to the geo masses.

-mpg

[I wonder if Carl Reed ever has to explain that OGC is not the same as OSGeo?]

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