[OSGeo-Discuss] [Board] OSGeo Board Priorities

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 7:33 AM, Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it> wrote:

> On the other hand, I still have problems with annual FOSS4G, which has a cost that
> scares away many top developers. IMHO (sorry to insist, I raised this point earlier)
> the meeting should be free for developers (committers to OSGeo projects), and more
> expensive for businessman.

Its common practice in academic circles to have one price for
academics and another for non-academics at workshops and conferences.
But then its fairly easy to confirm who is and who isn't an academic
(by requesting the info from the academic institution). FOSS4G 2013 in
Nottingham will have a number of academic bursaies for students, which
is another way to enable access to the conference.

 The problem with making FOSS4G cheaper (I think "free" would be too
much) for developers would be deciding who was a developer.

 Now, this could all be done by OSGeo making available a number of
developer bursaries. This would nominally come out of the profit
margin from the conference, but since it would be paid out by OSGeo it
wouldn't affect the local committee's accounting. OSGeo would then be
responsible for handling applications and deciding who gets it.

 Would anyone on the OSGeo board like to think about doing that for
FOSS4G 2013? A small number (<<10) of developer bursaries?

> The net cash flow should be from business to GFOSS
> promotion, not drawing from our precious developers.

  Agreed, but a lot of the developers do now work for businesses!
Which is great. We've always known that Open Source is 'Free' as in
speech, not "Free" as in beer, and that conference cost for a
developer who works for a business can get passed along to the
customers (indirectly, I'm not saying you invoice them for "Going To
The Very Wonderful FOSS4G Nottingham Conference").

Barry