[Board] Future perspectives for OSGeo

[Arnulf Christl (OSGeo)]

Folks,
the OSGeo board of directors has been working hard on finding ways
forward in those areas where we do not perform well. These are
especially on the business side of things. Our annual revenue has come
down considerably in the last years and we seem to lack high level
contacts to global players. Without the single sponsor Autodesk we
honestly wouldn't be where we are now but they have considerably reduced
their focused on geospatial.

We see new opportunities by starting joint activities with the Eclipse
foundation - which is in the process of spawning activities explicitly
focused on geospatial. They have lots of high level contacts but lack a
noteworthy community. This is where we in turn did exceptionally well,
we are perceived as *the* global voice for open source geospatial.

In between the community and business work (if we take them as extremes)
is a long range of things we did well and not so well and obviously
everybody will have their own opinion. If you are interested in learning
more about what the board is thinking and want to share your ideas I
suggest you subscribe to the board list and become active there. (Please
refrain from telling us "you must be doing this and that" but reckon
that whatever will happen does so because you also commit to actually
doing it).

Once we come to a more coherent point of view we will again share it
with this discussion list but for now would like to keep it at the
"strategically interested" level of things, just as open as all in OSGeo
- but not cluttering the Discuss list.

The board will start to post a few threads in the next days summarizing
the thoughts shared so far.


Best regards,
Arnulf

-- 
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation
Arnulf Christl, President
http://www.osgeo.org