[Conference-europe] when and where

[Johan Van de Wauw]

On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 2:24 AM, Karel Charvat <charvat at ccss.cz> wrote:
> 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.

I agree with Karel a lot. Compared to Foss4G in Nottingham I found
Bremen quite "academic". I don't think we need a separate commercial
track, but I think we should be able to attrack more "commercial"
people.

Some ideas on how to do this:
* Get more involvement from local chapters. Eg.  the German, Dutch and
British all have successful conferences. I was surprised to see little
of their members in Bremen
* The keynotes: I think we could get a better mix. Now there was no
keynote from an open source project, which could probably attract more
people. 2 were academic (or seem so when reading the website).
* The website: For a long time, we only had the keynotes and the
academic track online. I found it hard to justify my trip to foss4g-e
based on that program.
* Sponsors: It may sound silly, but an open source Geospatial
conference sponsered by Google and ESRI "seems" more worthwhile than
one which is not.

A lot of this is about the "image" of the conference, rather than the
actual content. I should add that I think this is something where this
group could be working on. Take some of the burden from the local
organisation away (so they can focus on the venue, ...). Website,
programme, sponsors are items which perhaps don't have to be run only
by the local organisers.

BTW: all these comments are here to make the programme even better. I
can not thank the organisers in Bremen enough for the great thing they
did.

Johan