[Board] OSGeo Priorities: Should OSGeo act as a high capital or low capital organisation?

[Cameron Shorter]

In preparation for the OSGeo Board meeting in a bit over 24 hours, I'd 
like to suggest some talking points to help us frame what we should 
focus on as priorities.

Should OSGeo act as a high capital or low capital organisation?

Ie, should OSGeo dedicate energy to collecting sponsorship and then 
passing out these funds to worth OSGeo causes.
While initially it seems attractive to have OSGeo woe sponsors, because 
we would all love to have more money to throw at worthy OSGeo goals, the 
reality is that chasing money is hard work. And someone who can chase 
OSGeo sponsorship is likely conflicted with chasing sponsorship for 
their particular workplace. So in practice, to be effective in chasing 
sponsorship, OSGeo will probably need to hire someone specifically for 
the role. OSGeo would then need to raise at least enough to cover wages.
This high capital path is how LocationTech are setting themselves up. It 
might be successful, but OSGeo is currently not structured as a high 
capital organisation.

The path which OSGeo is currently following is the low capital path. Our 
overheads are very low, which means we waste very little of our 
volunteer labour on the time consuming task of chasing and managing 
money. Consequently, any money we do receive (from conference windfalls 
or similar) goes a long way - and doesn't get eaten up by high 
overheads. I'd argue that this low capital path is something that is 
working very well for us, and the path we should continue to pursue.

So what should be our financial priorities?

1. Our primary focus should be to back the major foss4g events, eg: the 
global foss4g, and regional foss4g events like foss4g-na.  This requires 
sufficient bank balance to guarantee conference loans. These events 
should also be our primary source of income.

2. Our secondary income priority is to cover all the costs of running 
osgeo. Bank fees, insurance, infrastructure hosting, etc.

2. Our tertiary focus should be to cover related smaller osgeo type events.

3. Then with any spare budget, we should use for incidental marketing 
type activities - paying for non-consumables at conferences (banners etc).
If we have budget, we could possibly also subsidise consumables (eg 
LiveDVD printing), but we should not give away these things. We should 
be asking events to pay for these things, and we should not be paying 
conference organisors for a booth at events.


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Solutions Manager
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

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