[Foss4g2010] Attracting people to Barcelona 2010 event

[Marco Ciolli]

Hello everybody,

some months have passed since the end of Sidney conference.
Finally I have found the time to translate this e-mail that I wrote as a 
draft in Italian long ago to Lorenzo.
I spent many hours at the OSGeo booth in Sidney and I had the
possibility to talk with Lorenzo Becchi about the incoming Barcelona
conference.
Both during Sidney conference and after my return home, with some of my
colleagues all over the world working in Academic and research field, we
have tried to imagine how the next Barcelona conference could be
organized after the experiences of Lausanne, Victoria, Capetown and
Sidney to attract more users/developers.

In Sidney the "academic" session was very reduced if you compare it to
other FOSS4G conferences, and for this reason many interested people
from universities/research field decided to skip Sidney conference.

Is a common opinion that the availability of complete proceedings like
in Capetown is strongly advised, since it can be attractive for many
people, especially but not only in the academic world.

I specify that I have liked very much Sidney conference, but many people
(and I am among them) strongly disagreed with the procedure
used in Sidney that made people vote for or against abstracts through
the web.
I personally know some colleagues who decided not to participate Sidney
conference after having understood how the selection procedure worked,
independently from the result of the selection itself.
We are talking about an Open Source conference, so everyone who wants
should be allowed to participate and to present works. A selection
should be done deciding what are the works worth to be presented in oral
presentation and what are the works that can be presented in a poster
session but nobody should be excluded because he has not enough friends
who vote for him.
A "scientific" committee should decide where to put the different works
(oral scientific/oral general/poster) instead, as it generally happens
in conferences.
However, the web vote could be interesting to complete some information 
about the single papers.

The formula that was used to organize Capetown proceedings seemed to me 
a very good one.
Works were classified in:
Academic Presentation (complete papers)
General Presentation (complete papers)
Poster (only abstract)

Proceedings should be published in a CD with an ISBN (the procedure to
obtain a ISBN is quite simple). Many universities can provide an ISBN
because they work also as publishers.
The only fact that I didn't like of the Capetown proceedings CD is that
it could be browsed only in a Windows OS but this a minor technical
problem that can be easily solved.

Proceedings should be also on-line with an address that guarantees a
certain future persistence of the links (just to have an example, Open
Source Free Software GIS - GRASS users conference 2002 in Trento still
has all documents available
http://www.ing.unitn.it/~grass/conferences/GRASS2002/home.html
or
FOSS/GRASS 2004 Bangkok, Thailand still have all docs available:
http://gisws.media.osaka-cu.ac.jp/grass04/papers.php)

OSGeo could be a possible repository for proceedings?

The templates of papers are already available (Open office and Latex)
from Sidney and Capetown.

Electronic publication (CD and web site) is simpler and far less
expensive than paper publication. Moreover, electronic publication is
more suitable for fast moving disciplines like Free and Open source
software use/development.

A referee committee is needed, but a base referee committee already
exists, starting from the very good job that Thierry Badard did for
Sidney, so we can ask people to join again for Barcelona.


The possibility to publish a selected number of papers (so a selection
of the selection) in particular journals, like ISI or Scopus indexed and
so on could be explored, but the right person to contact for this
process is certainly Thierry Badard, who started a similar procedure for
Sidney papers and is carrying out a very good job.
Many academic people surely are interested in publishing in indexed
journals, but under the organization point of view, this is certainly a
complication.

Time is not so much, September will be here in flash and I don't know if
we will be able to find a journal that will publish selected works in so
few months.

I hope all these considerations could help Lorenzo Becchi in organizing
Barcelona event in the best way and to have many people at the conference.


Best regards to everybody and happy new year!





-- 
Marco Ciolli

Laboratory of Ecology
DICA - Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Faculty of Engineering
University of Trento
Via Mesiano 77 - 38123
Trento
Italy

Phone +390461882625
Fax   +390461882672

Marco.Ciolli at ing.unitn.it