[Conference-europe] when and where

[Peter Baumann]

On 08/22/2014 09:37 AM, Johan Van de Wauw wrote:
> 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.

that had to do with the response to our industry call. We even did quite some 
1:1 calls - essentially, we had these types of responses:
- "we already support FOSS4G global" (ESRI)
- "we are proprietary vendors, we do not support OS"
- "we do not like FOSS4G-E because it has not been initiated by FOSSGIS"
- "sorry, no budget"


>
> 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

indeed; if you know the history then you see that we had faced quite some 
opposition while trying to implement the "do-ocracy" model. You may have 
observed that we had no endorsement from German FOSSGIS - given this I was very 
happy to see 200 people gathering on campus during this week.

But we also wanted to make this a truly European, not German event. It turned 
out that you really need a participant from some nation in the Committee to 
reach those (and be it just for the language issue). So one recommendation might 
be: get a "Europe Committee" for each conference where each nation / language / 
younameit is present, with the sole obligation of translating news into their 
language + propagating it into local channels. We did this for those languages 
we could cover, including doing local mailings.

> * 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).

for sure we could do better in future - but given it was the first FOSS4G-E 
(hopefully in a long row) we wanted to emphasize its importance, and we were 
happy to have such a broad coverage of key community opinion leaders making an 
affirmative statement by coming by.

> * 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.

thanks, very much appreciated (also speaking for the team)! I am all for open 
discussion as only this allows us to learn & do better. I am well aware that the 
event was less than perfect, but the relatively small group of organisers has 
done an amazing job getting us to the stated goal that people say "we liked this 
one, and we would like to see another FOSS4G-E next year somewhere".

-Peter


>
> Johan
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-- 
Dr. Peter Baumann
  - Professor of Computer Science, Jacobs University Bremen
    www.faculty.jacobs-university.de/pbaumann
    mail: p.baumann at jacobs-university.de
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  - Executive Director, rasdaman GmbH Bremen (HRB 26793)
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