[OSGeo-Discuss] FOSS4G 2013 Nottingham Update

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Fri, May 10, 2013 at 8:14 AM, Peter Baumann
<p.baumann at jacobs-university.de> wrote:

> +1 here. I believe this should not be a Postgres event (substitute Postgres by
> your favorite), but allow to gather folks from as many domains as possible. This
> would mean to give space to as many projects as possible, and I personally would
> not dare to judge about one being "interesting". Maybe multiple submissions from
> a single project might be combined into one to leave space for the crowd?

 I think this kind of thing did happen, especially with the
presentations. If we had two similar presentations from the same
person or the same organisation in some cases we asked them to
choose-or-merge. Merging is perhaps harder with workshops since you
end up cramming in more hands-on things for people to do and leave
them bewildered.

 An additional constraint/opportunity we have with workshops is to
attract delegates from the AGI GeoComm meeting in Nottingham running
prior to FOSS4G. These may well not be open-source geo people, so we
aim to schedule introductory workshops on the first day so that some
of those delegates can stay over. This was all in our original
proposal document, and part of our "Geo For All" mission.

> Maybe this - very fruitful and balanced - discussion could lead to some best
> practices for future FOSS4Gs?
>
> Kudos to the committees at large - it is an extermely diverse and challenging
> task to organize such a big event!

 One day we will all agree on the exact non-linear contrained
optimisation algorithm that is conference planning and the committee
will be redundant! Hooray! I'll be able to get on with my day job! :)

Barry