[OSGeo-Discuss] Proprietary GIS on our OSGeo website

[Jody Garnett]

Comments inline:

> Thank you Ben, this is absolutely correct: we have an amazing vibrant
> community, and we need a front-end website that fosters and promotes OSGeo
> projects (especially those in OSGeo incubation as well as OSGeo Community
> projects) and OSGeo initiatives such as the Summer of Code. Period.  Full
> stop.  This is what our community is good at, and why we are so desired
> today.  From experience I can tell you that this struggle, that is being
> put forth here, will just separate our community (you can see it is
> already) and make the community weaker.
>

I am not sure I see this as a struggle Jeff.

Outreach will not weaken our community, it is literally what our community
is for - to advocate for open source. Our vision is: *Empower everyone with
open source geospatial*

If our community focuses only ourselves we will not be meeting our
objective.

Let us help our OSGeo community grow.   Don't worry about competing
> organizations (trust me they are fine, they have big money for marketing
> and teams of people working on that), just focus on OSGeo and our wonderful
> community.
>

I don't think anyone was worried about competing organizations having a
hard time :)

We are worried about individuals that have only ever had a chance to hear
from proprietary software. We want these individuals to have a chance to
hear from us about a better approach to geospatial technology -
specifically to hear about our projects and the benefits of not only using
open source but being part of an open source community.

I am setting up an OSGeo "Website Management Team" now, to help bring the
> focus on the OSGeo community, manage the website (and WordPress theme),
> security, backups, content etc, and will propose this to OSGeo's Systems
> committee and OSGeo Board; for the longterm maintenance of the website.  I
> imagine during this maintenance process we will be removing these
> unnecessary promotions, and focus on the OSGeo community (us). We'll leave
> promotion of other things for those with the big money ha, as they have the
> big funding for their products, as you mentioned.  We will focus on the
> OSGeo community.
>

Jeff we kind of got stuck on this one, the SAC motion to host the beta
website is waiting on your proposal. I assume you got busy with the CRO
responsibilities, do you know when you will be available with a proposal
for SAC to consider?

I would kindly ask you to go over the though behind the website content - I
do not know specifically what you are referring to as unnecessary. If you
are talking about pivoting the website to focus on "us" rather than
promotion and outreach then I am really sad and feel like you have missed
the point of the exercise.
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