[OSGeo-Conf] FOSS4G 2007 - whats in a name?

[Tyler Mitchell]

Arnful wrote:
> Ah - I see another North American centered opinion (Hi mpg) added the
> Open-only notion. So we are balanced now in numbers but the Free folk
> cover more space. We still win the argument - at least spatially.

Is this really North America vs. the world?  Then Helena and Allan  
better move!

You are coming at this from an ideological standpoint.  Do you  
believe that having "F" in the name of a conference is going to teach  
people that "free, as in speech" is important?  I believe that to  
many people, seeing "free" in a title will still just mean "free, as  
in beer".  Rather than trying to use the conference name as a way to  
teach, aren't there better ways you can help educate the masses to  
the importance of "free"?

I doubt care to teach anything with the conference name, but want to  
use it as an effective marketing tool for all the great project  
communities and for OSGeo as the sponsoring organisation.

I do believe that FOSS4G worked fine for this (and past) years, but  
so did all the other names --OSG, MUM, EOGEO, GRASS, etc.  I don't  
think it has hurt us, but I wonder if we can do even better with  
something new that is distinct from historic conferences.  We are  
bigger and better now that we are combined.

I guess no matter what it is called this year, I want to say it's the  
"OSGeo conference called..." so that I don't have to say it's the  
"Free and Open Source Software For Geoinformatics conference".  (Life  
is too short to waste those precious few syllables!  Just kidding.   
It is a mouthful, but does taste good with a bit of Gruyeres.)

Thanks for the debate,
Tyler