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

[Arnulf Christl]

On Sun, October 1, 2006 20:54, Paul Ramsey wrote:
>
> On 1-Oct-06, at 4:47 AM, Arnulf Christl wrote:
>
>> Fine, but do we need to be attractive to the more general public. I
>> think
>> we actually "want" an industry niche event - its the meeting of the
>> tribes. The more general public is better reached at Where 2.0, OSCON,
>> Intergeo, CeBit, etc. What we are talking about is the event
>> (currently)
>> restricted to some 750 to 1000 people. That is the niche population.
>
> I want to take this on.  Should we organize the conference (and we
> leaning closer to positive now) the reason would be to fertilize our
> local marketplace.  Invite every GIS coordinator within 500 miles,
> flog them over and over to come, so that they come and hear all the
> great success stories, feel the energy, see the companies, and get
> charged to try open source stuff.  So being accessible to a general
> (geospatial) audience is actually a very important thing, IMHO, this
> is not just a conference for those already "in the know".  At least,
> not if I organize it.

Greata Paul,
this is exactly our job as companies.  Next week we will be at the
Intergeo 2006 trade fair. 15 thousand visitors are expected. It is by far
the largest business event we have in Germany around geospatial. All the
people going there will spend money on geospatial software in the
multimillion $ range. It is just a question how large a share we can make
as businesses. Therefore OSGeo gets a booth of 30 by 16 m and presents
itself plus 10 service providers. And so on and so forth. Next year I am
going to make sure that you are there.

But the 'meeting of the tribes' to me is something different. Its the
place where one can make strategic thinking with link minded business.
Usually I am alone out there. Fighting proprietary FUD and trying to guide
fearful and consultance-resitant customers. They don't even read this
because they are simply not deeply enough into it. I make business out of
what I learn at FOSS4G.

> This is a lot like what happened with the Lausanne conference, when
> you look at the attendee list, it has a lot of "local" participants,
> folks within a few hundred miles.

This is a general locative effect with conferences. The same share that in
Germany appears every year would also go to an OSGeo confernce, this year
it was 350. Those didn't go to FOSS4G because its too specialized for
them. To you this happens in Ottawa and Minnesota. Therefore you should
make sure that you make your local chapter conference, especially if the
major OSGeo conference "Something FOSS 2007" takes place in South Africa.
Talk to the people in your physical vicinity. This is where we generate
our business and most small caps do it that way.

We developers of core software do not make any money with generic
development. Not yet at least. But we solve loads of problems and this is
our investment into the future of FOSS Geo.

Therefore you need this meta level conference to meet the people and try
to work out how the work done at that level can be turned into revenue.

Something like that. Its too simple again I guess.

:-)

Arnulf.