[OSGeo-Conf] Access

[Daniel Ames]

Conference committee folks,

As someone who just spent over $8000 on this past weeks conference, I should
probably express a few thoughts on this topic. I'm sure that for some of you
this is not a lot of money. But our little research lab and MapWindow
project are on as much a shoestring as anyone. In any case, $8000 bought two
airplane tickets to South Africa ($3000) lodging ($1000) per diem ($1000) a
booth ($1500) and shwag ($1500).

Yeah, this was a lot of money for us, but what a great opportunity to meet
with users and developers from that side of the world. Turns out that we
actually had a bigger impact in South Africa than at some regional
conferences since we were able to meet with lots of locals who are using our
software - who would never go to a conference in the U.S. In other words,
there is value is taking these tools to the distant corners of the earth (be
it Salmon, Idaho or Cape Town South Africa) to reach people who can't come
to us.  So I would hate to see OSGeo limit FOSS4G venues to only places
where lots of development work is going on.

Helena's idea of switching to every other year is actually a pretty good
idea. We do that with our AWRA GIS and Water Resources conferences and our
Environmental Modelling and Software Society meetings. In fact at this
year's  AWRA GIS conference there was a vote as to whether to move to a
yearly conference. Almost everyone voted to stay bi-yearly. The expressed
reasons included that it makes it a much more exciting meeting to go to
because you can do a lot of work in 2 years so there's always lots of new
stuff to see.

Distance is always going to be a problem for someone. But to be a truly
world -wide organization I don't think OSGeo can or should try to limit
distances for conferences.

So, will we go to Australia next year?  I hope so. Probably at least send
one person. Will we sponsor a booth or a table? If the economy holds out and
I still have funding... Would it be nice to meet in North America again? You
bet. But not every year. In fact, holding this conference once every other
year would be great by me. Maybe then the projects would hold project
specific and/or regional meetings in the "off" years.

By the way, I hear from Ted and Brian that Cape Town was awesome, the
conference was great, the entertainment was fun, the contacts were
invaluable, and so forth. So thank you to all of you who organized this
conference! I hope some of you who were there got to meet these guys and see
where we're at with MapWindow.

- Dan

P.S. They lost our ISU banner in the airport shuttle van at the Cape Town
airport.  If anyone happens to have found that please let us know!





On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 10:41 AM, Paul Ramsey <pramsey at cleverelephant.ca>wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 6, 2008 at 8:54 AM, Markus Neteler <neteler at osgeo.org> wrote:
> >
> > Can we please return to the topic?
>
> Barriers to access:
>
> -- Distance
>
> This is fundamentally difficult to deal with. Once you get beyond a
> couple hundred miles, and start adding overnights, there is going to
> be a cost, which will be "in the hundreds" (pick your currency) to
> attending an event.
>
> The obvious solution is just smaller conferences, but that dilutes the
> attendance, and doesn't necessarily fulfill some of the goals of
> "getting everyone together". No regional conference is going to get
> the PostGIS team together -- we live in Victoria, Boston, the UK, etc.
>
> Another semi-solution is the one used by ApacheCon, which basically
> charges full commercial convention rates (about $1500+) to ordinary
> attendees (who are presumably from corporate and government agencies)
> and then comps and flies in select members of project teams to speak
> (and meet).  O'Reilly conferences do a similar thing on a for-profit
> basis, charging ordinary goers high registration and using that to
> subsidize the "technical VIPs" who come and talk and share their
> knowledge.
>
> -- Registration
>
> As it stands, it is not financially feasible to give complimentary
> registration to more folks (see
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G2007_Discounts for examples of who
> got freebies in 2007, the list for 2008 is similar). However, it is
> easy enough to change that, simply raise the general registration and
> use the extra funds to widen the scope of people given comps.
>
> At that point, we enter new, uncharted waters: who, exactly, is
> eligible for special treatment, and how many of them will there be?
> Because we need to know how many new comps we have in order to raise
> the general admission price enough.
>
> -- Timing
>
> If it is students we care about, then the mid-week conference is a
> problem. Of course, the over-weekend conference is a barrier to
> family-men/women.  So pick your poison. Our most egregious timing
> barrier to date was our fateful ability to schedule on top of InterGeo
> not once (2007), but twice (2008). (Hooray for us!)
> _______________________________________________
> Conference_dev mailing list
> Conference_dev at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/conference_dev
>



-- 
Daniel P. Ames PhD, PE
Department of Geosciences
Idaho State University - Idaho Falls
amesdani at isu.edu
www.MapWindow.org
www.Hydromap.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/conference_dev/attachments/20081006/12e210a6/attachment.html