[OSGeo-Conf] RE: FOSS4G Sydney and conference software

[Cameron Shorter]

Looking at this from Tour Host's perspective, and making some 
assumptions about Tour Hosts:
1. Tour Hosts have a commitment to OSGeo to provide a professional, 
smooth conference.
2. Tour Hosts have a reputation to maintain to ensure that all their 
conferences are professional.
3. Tour Hosts has sunk cost proprietary software to manage all aspects 
of conferences which integrate with their existing work processes.
4. So there will be a cost and more importantly, a risk associated with 
integrating another Conference managing software with that used by Tour 
Hosts. Is there professional support for the OS software at an 
affordable price? Yes, we could rely on volunteers, but if I were Tour 
Hosts, I'd consider relying on volunteer effort for this as high risk, 
and high impact if issues are not resolved.
5. I think we can also assume that Professional Conference Organisors  
(PCOs) will be engaged in all/most future conferences, so the above 
assumptions will hold true for future conferences too.
6. All PCOs will have conference software they already use.

I suspect that conference software has become a commodity item and that 
there is little to be gained by using the same software every year. 
Please correct me if I'm wrong.

So at the moment, my gut feeling is keep risk and hence costs down by 
using Tour Hosts' existing processes and infrastructure. I love using 
Open Source more than most and would like to be convinced otherwise but 
sometimes we also need to be pragmatic.

Jeff McKenna wrote:
> I believe that it is critical to have stable software that each new 
> local committee can rely on.   That said, I think we should be open to 
> hearing how Tour Hosts can incorporate OCS use with their own 
> software, for 2009.
>
> -jeff
>
>
>
>
> On 20-May-08, at 2:20 AM, Gavin Fleming wrote:
>
>> The Conference Software, OCS, is from http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/. See 
>> http://pkp.sfu.ca/files/OCSinanHour.pdf for some more insight.
>>
>> The instance you would use is hosted and maintained by OSGeo in 
>> Canada (Tyler Mitchell).
>>
>> Hope this helps. If you have specific questions at your meeting we'll 
>> try to answer them from our experience.
>>
>> Gavin
>>


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Systems Architect
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

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