[Board] EGU GA 2020: Data Help Desk

["Peter Löwe"]

Dear Board, 
I’m reporting on the latest development regarding the new Data Help Desk (DHD) at the EGU General Assembly 2020 in Vienna and ask for your feedback and support.

Yesterday the DHD effort 2020 had its kickoff in a telco, with stakeholders from  AGU, EGU, ENVRI, ESIP, GEANT and OSGeo (yours truly).

This project will allow us to raise awareness about OSGeo and do reach out to early career scientitsts at EGU (16.000 attendees expected, over 50% of the early career scientists) on a completely new level (compared to earlier EGU-related efforts).

While it’s called a Data Help Desk, it’s about Open Science, which includes Open Data, but also Open Source. 

As an example, this is the agenda of the DHD at AGU 2019: https://copdess.org/data-fairs/2019-data-fair-at-agu-fall-meeting/ 

The Data Help Desk will be based in a (small) booth in a prime spot within the exhibition space of the conference. 

For those who have attended EGU before: The booth will be just opposite of the big EGU installation in the basement level (where complimentary conference postcards can be dropped of, EGU swag is sold, next to the mineral exhibition, near the photo competition).

Due to conference-related deadlines, the concept for the booth needs to be developed rapidly, within the next two weeks. 

The booth will be occupied for the whole conference (five days) by volunteers from various communities (-> opportunity for OGeo folks attending EGU) which will answer questions, serve as a switchboard to connect to experts, give presentations, etc. 

We can use this in several ways, based on already existing OSGeo handouts and presentations.
Even if the DHD booth will only be staffed with OSGeo activists infrequently, other staff can also hand out OSGeo-related gear or show high level presentations about OSGeo live.

I propose to set up a dedicated wiki-page for this, to gather ideas and links to documents, files, etc.

The Open GeoScience 2020 budget includes about 2500 USD for EGU-related activities. The OSGeo Lunchbag event (https://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2020/session/38173) which has to be covered by this budget is expected to cost less than 1.200 USD. So sufficient funding remains for Data Helpdesk related efforts, like giveaways or OSGeo Live thumbdrives / DVDs / postcards, etc.

For now, the DHD organizers at AGU/EGU have requested me to report this to the OSGeo Board and to ask whether this course of action is supported by the OSGeo Board (we have a MOU with AGU, but not EGU).

Best regards,
Peter

<peter.loewe at gmx.de>