[OSGeo-Conf] Fwd: Re: [Board] Fwd: Analysing the downfall of FOSS4G 2011
Cameron Shorter
cameron.shorter at gmail.com
Fri Aug 17 13:29:31 PDT 2012
Forwarding Tim's email to the conference email list, so we have all
comments archived in one place. ...
Tim, this is good feedback.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Board] Fwd: Analysing the downfall of FOSS4G 2011
Date: Fri, 17 Aug 2012 18:54:02 +0200
From: Tim Sutton <tim at linfiniti.com>
To: Cameron Shorter <cameron.shorter at gmail.com>
CC: FOSS4G 2012 <foss4g2012 at lists.osgeo.org>, OSGeo-Board List
<board at lists.osgeo.org>
Hi
On Mon, Aug 13, 2012 at 10:14 PM, Cameron Shorter
<cameron.shorter at gmail.com <mailto:cameron.shorter at gmail.com>> wrote:
FYI:
Please send responses to the conference_dev email list (or to me to
forward to the list).
Website out of date
A conference's website is the primary form of communication with
potential delegates. For FOSS4G 2012, the website took an
excessively long time to be developed and brought online, and then
when it was brought online, it contained incorrect information and
broken links
<http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/foss4g2012/2012-February/000016.html>
(mainly cut and paste from the prior FOSS4G website
<http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/foss4g2012/2012-March/000018.html>).
People were having significant issues with submitting papers and
registering to attend
<http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/conference_dev/2012-June/001843.html>.
The FOSS4G LOC had hired an external web developer to create the
website, who had done a poor job of development. It seemed that
there was a lack of quality control from both the web developer, and
LOC. In the past, development of the website has either been managed
by technically experienced developers (as was the case in 2009), or
by the PCO.
The lesson here is that the website needs to be made a priority and
suitably resourced. There is the potential for website management
software to be passed on from one conference to the next. (We
considered this option in 2009 but found the Open Source conference
management software used by FOSS4G 2008 was not going to integrate
easily with the software our PCO was using). It would be worth
future FOSS4G conferences revisiting this question.
One thing that struck me as an obvious place for improvement when we
were organising the CT FOSS4G in 2010 was the absence of any usable 'out
of the box' web infrastructure from OSGEO for running the conference in
particular:
- abstract submission
- conference pre-registration and at event registration
- sharing of talk presentation materials
- event planning (e.g. tools like
http://www.jboss.org/drools/drools-planner/ coould be used to optimise
the event schedule)
- project management within the loc
It seems that in most case the LOC contracts local people to provide
this - in our case IIRC the professional event organisers we used
provided the registration service for example which I believe
contributed to a substantial part of their fee (Gav correct me if I am
wrong here). It strikes me that the same problem is solved (probably
suboptimally) over again for each conference and it would make
conference hosting substantially easier if these things were in place
already when the LOC convenes. Wouldn't this be a good place for OSGEO
to invest revenue from conferences? Then with each conference it would
be simply a matter of deploying a new 'instance' of the software suite
for the purposes of the conference, theming the site and being on your way.
Many of the things needed can be provided by open source software but
having them pre-configured (e.g. issue categories in trac or a
conference theme for wordpress with page stubs and suitable plugins set
up etc) by experienced conference organisers would be an excellent way
of batton passing to the next LOC team.
I think some targetted investement in getting web presence and
conference organisation tools re-usable would substantially help to
ensure the success, and reduce the overheads of, future events.
Regards
Tim
--
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Solutions Manager
Tel:+61 (0)2 8570 5050 <tel:%2B61%20%280%292%208570%205050>
Mob:+61 (0)419 142 254 <tel:%2B61%20%280%29419%20142%20254>
Think Globally, Fix Locally
Geospatial Solutions enhanced with Open Standards and Open Source
http://www.lisasoft.com
_______________________________________________
Board mailing list
Board at lists.osgeo.org <mailto:Board at lists.osgeo.org>
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/board
--
Tim Sutton - QGIS Project Steering Committee Member (Release Manager)
==============================================
Visit http://linfiniti.com to find out about:
* QGIS programming services
* Mapserver and PostGIS based hosting plans
* FOSS Consulting Services
Skype: timlinux Irc: timlinux on #qgis at freenode.net <http://freenode.net>
==============================================
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/conference_dev/attachments/20120818/19176888/attachment-0001.html>
More information about the Conference_dev
mailing list