[OSGeo-Conf] Who's Got Next?

[Peter Batty]

Paul, I appreciate you raising this and I am very much in agreement with
your thoughts.

I do think that it seems as though there is a mismatch between the level of
detail asked for in the proposal and the stated selection criteria in the
RFP, and the actual judging process and criteria used in reality (I'd be
happy to provide more detailed feedback to anyone at OSGeo if you want
this).

I agree that OSGeo should come up with a more explicit strategy with regard
to geography. Personally I feel that there is a very strong case for having
more frequent regional conferences rather than a single global conference. I
can see pros and cons to designating one of these each year as "the" global
conference for that year. But I think that only having a major FOSS4G
conference every 4-5 years or so in either Europe or North America is a
significant inhibitor to the growth of open source geospatial software.

With multiple conferences you could consider a strategy of staggering them,
say a European conference in the spring and a North American one in the
fall/autumn (and perhaps one or more "others"). Or with today's video
conferencing and other communications technologies, you could consider
holding events concurrently in multiple locations and having some at least
some common sessions using video communicatons.

Whatever the strategy adopted, I think that at least the initial bid process
should be made significantly more lightweight, and focused where appropriate
(i.e. if there's a strong preference that the event should be in Europe, or
North America, or wherever, then say so up front). One idea might be to have
an initial "expression of interest" phase where teams just put together a 2
or 3 page summary, and then you come up with an appropriate shortlist of
teams to ask for more detail (if necessary).

Cheers,
    Peter.

On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 9:21 PM, Paul Ramsey <pramsey at cleverelephant.ca>wrote:

> 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.
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-- 
Peter Batty - President, Spatial Networking
W: +1 303 339 0957  M: +1 720 346 3954
Blog: http://geothought.blogspot.com
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