[OSGeo-Conf] [Board] FOSS4G North America 2013

[Cameron Shorter]

David and others, I'm on irc://freenode.net#osgeo now if you wish to 
discuss.

On 22/08/2012 7:48 AM, David William Bitner wrote:
>
>
>     Looking from another perspective, the FOSS4G North America
>     conference has already been widely publicized (see
>     http://foss4g-na.org/save-the-date-foss4g-north-america-2013/,
>     widely reposted elsewhere). If we choose not to provide this
>     support then the team will have to cancel the event, which I think
>     will be seen to reflect very negatively on OSGeo. Canceling one
>     major planned event (Beijing) is bad enough, canceling two within
>     the space of a few months would really damage our credibility.
>
>     You can argue various points about whether it should have been
>     "announced" before getting everything agreed, but we are where we
>     are and I think no matter how you spin it, many people would see
>     it as another significant setback for OSGeo if we didn't go ahead.
>
>
> I just want to take a minute to make clear (from my perspective) how 
> we got to where we are. From the attempted formation of the North 
> American Chapter last year to support the NA event in DC, it was made 
> clear that the Conference Committee did not have the bandwidth to deal 
> with other conferences. The DC event was fortunate in that it was able 
> to secure the event through the initial sponsors of the event OpenGeo 
> and Radiant Blue. It is with the assumption that the Conference 
> Committee did not want a hand in vetting these regional events that, 
> as the only people who expressed an interest in hosting this 
> conference on the North America mailing list that we took on the 
> mantle from the DC crew where a preliminary announcement was made that 
> MSP would host the next event. The event in the Twin Cities is being 
> hosted by the Twin Cities Local Chapter of OSGeo which is not a legal 
> entity and as such does not have any ability to underwrite this 
> conference. This is why I first approached the Board rather than the 
> Conference Committee to seek assistance for the financial backstop 
> role. The Board then directed me to put the issue to the Conference 
> Committee first.
>
> I do not think that losing this commitment from OSGeo will scuttle our 
> event completely. I do think it will cause OSGeo to miss out on an 
> opportunity to take on an activity that 1) strongly supports the 
> mission and 2) has a strong likelihood of creating a profit for our 
> chapter's "parent organization". If OSGeo cannot fulfill this role, it 
> will be a *major *setback for us and we will likely need to create a 
> relationship with someone else where we would lose all that revenue 
> from our community.
>
> David


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

Think Globally, Fix Locally
Geospatial Solutions enhanced with Open Standards and Open Source
http://www.lisasoft.com

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