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

Fri Jan 6 06:11:40 PST 2012

I think this is a great place to start, and I don't have anything further
that I'd like to add, only a plea that we do try and keep things focused so
that we can come away from this meeting with some concrete plans. I think
that's the only way we can recover some momentum, and also provide us with
positive news to send out.

Jo

On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 5:03 AM, Peter Batty <peter at ebatty.com> wrote:

> 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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>

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