[OSGeo-Conf] questions about FOSS4G2008 bid
Paul Ramsey
pramsey at refractions.net
Thu Jun 7 19:06:08 EDT 2007
Gavin,
Great questions all!
On 7-Jun-07, at 12:59 PM, Gavin Fleming wrote:
> I am working on a bid and have the following questions at this stage:
> Which body undertakes dinancial transactions for the conference?
> Any local company or organisation identified by the LOC, or OSGEO
> internationally, or something else?
For FOSS4G2007, our conference organizing company, Seatosky, is
serving as the "banker". We have a bank account specifically for the
conference, and Seatosky handles all the sponsor invoicing,
registration fees, bill paying, etc. This is something that
realistically a local company of *some sort* would have to handle,
not a conference organizing company necessarily, but something. The
overhead involved in OSGeo itself operating as the banker, across
international borders, etc, would be too high.
> The RFP states that the conference should break even and if there
> is a loss, OSGeo will cover it. If there is a profit, where does
> that go?
Same place the loss would go: OSGeo. They kindly accept the risk and
graciously accept the reward.
> Is translation a requirement or is the entire conference in English?
The conference in Lausanne last year (mostly French region of
Switzerland) was largely in English, with the exception of a few
plenary sessions in French. No translation was provided for either
English or French, that I recall.
> In the evaluation criteria in the RFP it states that it is
> desirable for the conference to move around. Please clarify what
> this means.
This year the conference is in the northwest of North America. It's
unlikely that a bid from, say Seattle, or Portland, or Calgary, would
be considered "desirable", drawing as they would from the same local
pool of attendees. The attendance at each conference is made up of a
majority of local attendees and a minority of from-far-away
attendees, so it is helpful to have a fresh pool of local attendees
each time.
This is a "loose" criteria. Some committee members might interpret
it to mean a new continent every year. I personally would consider
the midwest or east of North America sufficiently far away for the
conference to have "moved" desirably. A lot will depend on what
proposals are received, frankly.
> Our national GIS organisation, GISSA (Geoinformation Society of
> South Africa) is planning a major national GIS conference in 2008
> and rather than have it it March as planned and risk splitting the
> local market for GIS conferences (it will be difficult for many
> people here to justify to their employers going to two
> conferences), we would like to consider running it in parallel, or
> overlapping, with FOSS4G2008, in Spet/Oct 2008. Please let me know
> if this is OK in principle then we can discuss further.
I think you'll have to explain what that would mean in terms of
resources available for FOSS4G, positives, negatives, etc, and let
folks evaluate it on its merits. You may find that as you explore
the idea with GISSA that some things that *they* expect (registration
fees, number of tracks, length of conference) don't gybe with things
that *you* expect. Joint conferences can be tricky, do your homework
so you can explain your option well.
I guess what I am saying is that a joint conference is not a deal
breaker, but the committee will want to understand how it will work
in practice. Properly done, it could be quite a positive thing, in
my personal view.
Paul
More information about the Conference_dev
mailing list