Funding conferences

[Arnulf Christl]

Hi,
the FOSSGIS was funded by people paying for 2h workshops (€99,- each) 
and sponsors:
http://www.fossgis.de/wiki/index.php/MesseSponsoring

We could use the premises of the University of Bonn free of cost 
including the technical infrastructure with excellent connectivity via 
LAN and 100 WLAN accounts.


This left us with a rest of money that we want to get rid of.

:-)

It is not much - really it is only very little but the question was 
raised how to proceed with this.

We would like the next conference to be organized through this OSGeo 
committee, mailing list, infrastructure and thus be able to better 
coordinate with other conferences. So ideally we would like to use the 
money to fund the OSGeo conference committee and be able to use some of 
it for next year's conference - at least as a fall back option if 
participation should not be as high as expected (which will not happen 
if you ask me).
We are pretty positive that we can start to request for a fee to attend 
the next German lang conference, there are enough people who will also 
attend it it does cost something. Additionally we decided that the 
conference should stay focused on users who are already into it so that 
we can keep the high standards. New users will need to be informed and 
infected with the OSGeo virus through trade fairs, conventions and 
thematically specialized conferences. The initial intention of getting 
as many people to the user conference as possible to spread word is not 
that important anymore.

Just some more ideas.

Best, Arnulf.

PS:
Which mailing list is to be used by conference.osgeo? I suggest to 
remove all but dev and announce, it is hell to keep track all of the lists.