[OSGeo-Conf] FOSS4G2012: Next Steps

[Paolo Cavallini]

Il 11/07/2011 22:16, Cameron Shorter ha scritto:

> 1. What is your ability to attract local and regional delegates. What connections do
> you have with the local geospatial communities? Are you in a position to help
> encourage participation from local communities?

We (GFOSS.it) have about 100 associates, and the community is over 500 people,
regularly growing. Our conferences (GFOSS Days, GRASS Meetings, gvSIG dyas) are
attended by hundreds of persons.

> 2. What is your ability to attract local sponsorship? Sponsorship covers a large
> proportion of the costs of the conference. How are you planning to attract local
> sponsors? Do you have anyone in a position to influence attraction of sponsors?

The above mentioned conferences have always been sponsored by Public Administrations,
banks, and other firms. Many of GFOSS.it members work in the Public Administrations,
Universisies, and private companies, and have proved successful to attract funding to
support our conferences and meetings.

> 3. Do you have dynamic, decisive, committed people on your committee? This one might
> be a bit hard to answer. To be successful, you will need to make lots of decisions.
> Some will have straight forward answers. Most won't. You will need to be decisive and
> you will need to spend a large amount of time selflessly thinking about the
> conference. Doing things, and encouraging others to do things. I think I was spending
> ~ 10 to 15 hours / week on the conference in the first 12 to 6 months out, then 15 to
> 20 hours / week in the 6 months before the conference.

GFOSS.it has a formal Steering Committee, elected by the Annual General Assembly. The
SC regularly holds meeting (once a month at least) to take formal decisions about
budget and other issues of the Association.
we have volunteers deling with our infrastructure, including a web portal, a wiki, a
debian repo, a data repo, several mailing lists and IRC channels.
Furthermore, in GFOSS.it community we have prominent developers of several crucial
software, including SpatiaLite, GeoServer, and PostGIS.

All the best.
-- 
Paolo Cavallini: http://www.faunalia.it/pc