[Conference-europe] when and where

[Mateusz Łoskot]

On 21 August 2014 10:50, Jachym Cepicky <jachym.cepicky at gmail.com> wrote:
> let's move forward, proposal for call for venue parameters:
>
> 150-200 attendees

+1

> Low cost especially for students

Low cost

> 2+ days talks with parallel academic track (of course according to
> submitted proposals)
> at least 1 day for code sprint and/or hackathon

IMHO, a code sprint or any other events close to software development are
required. Reason?
- OSGeo/FOSS4G roots are in software development, later extended to
cover other aspects
- majority of community is involved in development (note, development
is not only programming,
but also brainstorming ideas, designs, architectures, documentation, etc.)
- face-to-face meetings is what the community is missing and FOSS4G is
one of few opportunities
to gather folks in one place so they can collaborate...supporting such
face-to-face meeting-and-hacking
should be one of major points of the agenda.

Otherwise, developers will face cost-related dilemma: should I go to a
general conference or one of code sprint-only events.

Number of IT events grow every year, so it's become more important to
have a topic, than make a huge one-for-all event.
IMHO, main focus of OSGeo/FOSS4G is software and data, and all
activities that are closely related.
>From what I see, general discussions about INSPIRE or OGC are not
particularly interesting topics to our community,
unless we talk about a particular standard, its implementation(s) and
related issues.

By the way, do we have statistics from previous FOSS4G conferences
about number of attendees to particular talks,
presentations or tracks?
IMHO, such data would help to decide on how to design the event to fit
the community needs best.

Best regards,
-- 
Mateusz  Łoskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net