[Board] Draft announcement regarding FOSS4G 2012

[Peter Batty]

Hi all, as discussed at the board meeting last week, here is a draft
announcement from the board about FOSS4G 2012. All feedback welcome. One
specific question: are there other "regional FOSS4Gs" we should mention?

We agreed we should aim to get an announcement out this week if possible.

Cheers,
    Peter.

It was announced last week by the local organizing committee that the
FOSS4G 2012 conference that was scheduled to be held in September in
Beijing has been canceled. The OSGeo board was disappointed to hear this of
course. We have known for some time, as has anyone who follows the OSGeo
conference or board public mailing lists, that the local committee was
facing various challenges. But we wanted to give the local team the maximum
chance to try to pull together an event.

FOSS4G has been successful being a truly global conference, taking a major
event around the world with most of the work done by local volunteers.
We've had great success with this approach, with excellent events in cities
including Sydney and Cape Town. But this approach has its risks too, and
we'll look carefully at what we can learn from this year to mitigate these
risks in future.

But FOSS4G remains strong. The 2011 event in Denver was the largest yet,
with 900 people from 42 countries and great reviews from attendees. And
plans for FOSS4G 2013 in Nottingham are already very advanced, we have a
very strong team organizing that and are looking forward to a great event
there.

FOSS4G has also evolved into multiple regional events in addition to the
global one. We have had multiple successful regional FOSS4G events already
this year: one for North America in Washington DC and one for Central and
Eastern Europe in Prague. FOSS4G Japan will take place in November.

OSGeo normally presents the Sol Katz award at the annual FOSS4G conference,
to recognize an individual as a leader in the geospatial open source
community. The Sol Katz award will still be made this year, but it is still
to be determined how, when and where the presentation will take place. Also
the OSGeo Annual General Meeting will be rescheduled in due course.
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