[OSGeo-Conf] A: Questions for FOSS4G 2013 teams (Peter Batty) - Helsinki

Thu Apr 5 02:10:49 EDT 2012

Peter and others,

I just realize that Easter holidays will have impact to response quickly to
all your questions. Or maybe this is not even Q&A session, but more like
online chatting. However, here are comments from Helsinki team to Peter's
questions:

Previous FOSS4G events:

I have personally only participated in one conference: Denver. My feeling
was that this FOSS4G was very similar with ESRI UC/DevSummit conferences. I
have over 10 year experience of those conferences. I also organize Finnish
User Conference several times. 

Ari Jolma has been in several FOSS4G conferences. As far as I remember, he
has just missed one: Australia. Maybe Ari can confirm this later on.

Other members in our General committee haven't participated FOSS4G
conferences before. I presume we will have 5-10 people in our committees who
have join previous FOSS4G conferences. I can't really give you names because
we haven't officially named them. That will happen during Stage 2. You can
guess and pick names from various OSGeo email lists.

Conference chairs commitment:

This is always challenging in Finland: Finns already think how they organize
conference and how much time it will take. And we are now preparing
application to the conference. So, by definition, whole conference committee
is very committed to organize this event. And we have already 15+
organizations who will support FOSS4G conference. So, let me explain in
details how our committee has been build: 

Forum Virium is organization which has excellent knowledge about organizing
different kind of events. CEO of Forum Virium, Mr. Jorma Eskelinen, has 20+
years' experience to organize events. His team is very dedicated to have
this conference to Helsinki.

I and Professor Ari Jolma are GIS nerds in the conference committee. I have
almost 20 year experience using and developing GIS systems. Ari will take
care about academic track. I presume that you know him better than me ;-)

General Director Jarmo Ratia and Director Jyrki J.J. Kasvi will be guiding
and leading advisors for rest of us. Mr. Ratia was president of GSDI and has
excellent contact network with European mapping agencies and via United
Nations Global Geospatial Information Management-initiative. Mr. Kasvi is
great advocate for Open Source and Data movements in Finland. He will give
us excellent perspective to use of open solutions in information society.

Real hard work will be done in subcommittees. We are currently working to
get people involved to these subcommittees. But as I said before, Finns
don't promise anything unless they can keep their words. So it took a little
bit longer to get people into the committees, but then they really have time
/resources to work on it.

I understand also Peter's worry about people risks (leaving/got
sick/accident..). We haven't made any kind of risk plan, yet. It will be
part of process, but not in this phase.

Conference focus / theme:

I don't believe white-and-black kind of things. There is always grey area.
So, maybe that's our motto. FOSS4G in Helsinki won't be just conferences for
FOSS4G developers. Neither it will be just for end users. Or it won't be
just "commercial" or "non-commercial". It's not even conference only for GIS
people, it will be also conference for non-GIS developers from commercial
(maybe closed source) companies. Key word will be open. We're preparing this
conference openly, with open mind. We listen carefully what people and
future participants of FOSS4G conference like to do and hear.

So, this openness won't be only software. As it was stated in Conference
RFP: ".support and promote. open geospatial technologies and data". We like
to cover open public and private data sources; we like to understand what it
means when government / companies are open. This open theme should include
also open standards, open API's etc. 

Forum Virium is organizing Open Knowledge Festival in next September. We
will have Open Geodata stream/track there. We will learn what other
(non-GIS, normal) people think about geographic information and its
usefulness. 

I do hope this answers (or comments) will clarify our LoI. 

Best Regards,

Pekka

--

Pekka Sarkola

pekka.sarkola at gispo.fi

Gispo Oy - www.gispo.fi

GSM 040 725 2042

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