[OSGeo-Conf] questions about FOSS4G2008 bid

[Paul Ramsey]

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