[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2013 Nottingham Update

[Barry Rowlingson]

I hope none of you on this list have missed any of the big news about
FOSS4G2013 - we're trying to ramp up the publicity and if its not
getting through to OSGeo-discuss list followers then we're probably
not getting through to enough people outside it! Catch it all by
following @foss4g and RT the good stuff.

So, two weeks ago we had our second face-to-face meeting in
Nottingham. The main agenda was selecting the programme from the
proposals we had. The process for doing this was essentially to take
the top 100 ranked community-rated proposals and then see which of the
highly committee-rated proposals had been left out. They were
considered and then we did another round of seeing which high
community-rated proposals were still left out. After consideration of
multiple similar papers from multiple authors and organisations we
were left with a program which largely reflects "the will of the
people" via the community vote. Massive thanks to Jeff McKenna for the
community vote system. Full details of the selection process will be
(maybe already has been) published on the OSGeo wiki.

The selected proposals were tagged and published:

http://2013.foss4g.org/provisional/

The Programme Team is now working hard on arranging all these talks
and other activities into a draft timetable. We anticipate some loss
due to cancellations but there should still be plenty of things to do.

The Workshop subcommittee also revealed their selected Workshops for
the pre-conference session, which will now run to two days. Beginner
workshops will run mainly on the first day to allow  AGI GeoComm
conference attendees to see the delights of Open Source options. The
provisional workshops are listed here:

http://2013.foss4g.org/provisional/workshops.html

Now that people mostly know what they will be getting for their money,
we expect registrations to rise significantly. Early bird registration
is open until the end of the month.

We announced our second diamond sponsor, The Met Office - The UK's
National Weather Service. They will be hosting the Hackathon on the
17th/18th September.

The debate about what stuff to throw at delegates on arrival
continues. Its unlikely there will be conference bags, so bring
something to carry things in.

 We will be sorting out t-shirt designs, possibly by competition, shortly.

We've also now appointed a volunteer Volunteer Coordinator, Abi Page,
who will be helping organise the horde of dedicated volunteers crucial
to the success of the event.

The academic bursary programme was announced:

http://2013.foss4g.org/registration/academic-bursaries/

which gives exceptional students and early-career researchers
subsidised conference attendance, provided by EDINA's generous
sponsorship. There are a limited number of these bursaries, so please
encourage applications from your best and brightest students. Details
and eligibility are on the web site.

As usual the committee has its regular fortnightly meetings and
continues to see a fantastic FOSS4G conference appearing over the
horizon!

Barry