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

[Arnulf Christl]

On Sun, October 1, 2006 20:51, Paul Ramsey wrote:
> What both "FOSS4G" and "OSGeo" have in common is that they are
> essentially meaningless, unfortunately. (FOSS4G actually has
> marginally more meaning, at least for the minimal subset of people
> who already know what "FOSS" stands for and only have to try and
> figure out the "G").
>
> At the risk of being totally orthogonal to the current decision
> process, how about something completely new, made up of actual words?
>
> * "FreeSpatial 2007"  (11 chars (ignoring the 2007))

Cool. I will write up an abstract of what this name means to OSGeo.

> * "Vive Spatial Libre! 2007"  (with apologies to Charles de Gaule)

And this one is for 2008 and is more business oriented. You pick a place
we make a proposal.

Best regards,

> Paul
>
>
>
>
> On 1-Oct-06, at 11:31 AM, Tyler Mitchell wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>> To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe at conference.osgeo.org
>> For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help at conference.osgeo.org
>>
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
> To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe at conference.osgeo.org
> For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help at conference.osgeo.org
>
>


-- 
Arnulf Christl
http://www.ccgis.de