[Conference-europe] when and where

[Karel Charvat]

I think, that umber of attendants is something, what is difficult predictable. Not so easy to reach 200 attendants.

I am all time thinking, how to do something, what could attract larger community. It seems to me, that till now we didn’t succeed to attract commercial sector to broader participation. Seems to me, that maximum 5 - 10 percent of companies, who are using Open Source GI technologies, are participating on such events.

More and more of so called Apps developers including independent developers is out of communities very often utilising other products or starting from scratch.  Seems for me critical, how to attract people.

OGC and INPIRE are important for business, because their standards define rules, which I as private company has accept.
I think, that academic track is good, but in some way, for me as representative of businesses seems for me FOOS4GI more academic oriented.

I would like to vote and also discuss something like commercial section.

-----Original Message-----
From: conference-europe-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [mailto:conference-europe-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Mateusz Łoskot
Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2014 11:04 AM
To: Jachym Cepicky
Cc: foss4g-europe
Subject: Re: [Conference-europe] when and where

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 _______________________________________________
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