[OSGeo-Conf] Who's Got Next?

[Paul Ramsey]

I'd like to raise the idea of being more explicit about what we,
OSGeo, desire in bids. We have in the past said we weren't going to
explicitly add "geography" to the RFP, but I can't help but feel that
we are to some extent we are doing it implicitly, and that's probably
not fair to bidders who aren't in the "target region" for a given
year.

In my handicapping of the process for this year, I figured that if
credible bids from North America or Europe were available, it was
unlikely that a bid from anywhere else was going to win, just because
the previous two events were "afar" from the bulk of the OSGeo
development community. As it happened, we had bids from both, and one
of the European bids won, which is kind of as one would expect, given
that the last European event was in 2006 (that's a four year
interregnum, had they failed to win, it would be at least a five year
gap between events in a very FOSS4G-friendly and FOSS4G-funding
locale).

Was this fair to Beijing? How much better would their bid have to have
been for us to choose another location in Asia/Pacific, right after
Sydney, and a third non-NA-EURO location in a row? I felt that the top
bids were all sufficiently good that there was little left to
distinguish them at a rational level, which doesn't leave much room
for someone to really "blow it out of the water". All that's left is
our own biases, which probably include, let's face it, geography.

We've got a pretty demanding bid process now, and bidders are doing a
fair amount of leg-work. Four bidders means three bidders who feel
they've worked hard "for nothing". I don't want people entering the
bidding process if they really don't stand a chance for (implicit)
geographical reasons.

I think we should be explicit, and try to get bids from particular
regions on a schedule: Europe, North America, Other. I apologize to
Other in advance, but if FOSS4G is going to be the "meeting of the
tribes" we need to hold it closer to the tribes more often, and the
tribes are mostly in Euro/NA.

P.