[OSGeo-Conf] Fwd: [Board] wondering about short interest in proposals this year

[Tim Bowden]

On Tue, 2008-01-29 at 09:15 +0100, Markus Neteler wrote:
> (sorry, wrong CC slipped in earlier)
> 
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Markus Neteler <neteler at osgeo.org>
> Date: Jan 29, 2008 9:14 AM
> Subject: Re: [Board] wondering about short interest in proposals this year
> To: Paul Ramsey <pramsey at refractions.net>
> Cc: "Michael P. Gerlek" <mpg at lizardtech.com>,
> conference_dev-request at lists.osgeo.org, board at lists.osgeo.org, Paolo
> Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it>
> 
> 
> On Jan 28, 2008 11:34 PM, Paul Ramsey <pramsey at refractions.net> wrote:
> > I think allowing Sydney to pre-submit their interest during the '08
> > process had the effect of freezing out some interest.  Tyler's note
> > about "letters of intent" is well-taken, though it might have the
> > effect of simply reducing down to a negotiated one submission per
> > year...

I don't think you can stop early bids (in fact, I'd encourage it).  Our
original intention was to put in a nominal bid for '08 peppered with
phrases like "when we re-submit for '09" to make it clear we didn't
actually want to win in '08.  In the end we changed it to an eoi to make
sure.  I know it sounds very mercenary, but our aim was to compete with
any other bids in our region.  Perhaps we were being too competitive,
but we really do want the conf here.

> 
> I know that there was interest to host the event in Italy but given
> the apparently good (ongoing) preparation of the Sydney proposal
> folks here gave up early. So I tend to agree with Paul here about
> the effect.
> 

We considered Italy and Germany to be our two main competitors.  I was
quite disappointed to see there was no submission from either one.
Given our experience at getting things organised, I firmly believe it
takes more than one year to get your bid in shape.  If we hadn't gone
through the motions for '08, I don't believe we'd have been as ready for
the '09 bid.  The '08 bid was a very valuable hurdle in getting us up to
speed for '09.  I'd encourage anybody intending to to bid for '10 to get
up to speed asap.

> Markus
> __
Regards,
Tim