[Foss4g2010] Attracting people to Barcelona 2010 event

[Paul Ramsey]

"Six blind men were asked to determine what an elephant looked like by
feeling different parts of the elephant's body. The blind man who
feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar; the one who feels the
tail says the elephant is like a rope; the one who feels the trunk
says the elephant is like a tree branch; the one who feels the ear
says the elephant is like a hand fan; the one who feels the belly says
the elephant is like a wall; and the one who feels the tusk says the
elephant is like a solid pipe."

What we have here, is an elephant of the highest order. Not only does
it look different to everyone, but it serves a different purpose for
each.

Bearing in mind that every attendee will probably include mixtures of
each of these categories in various degrees, here's the constituencies
as I perceive them:

1 * Academics, both students and faculty, who want a chance to present
and gain a conference citation for their work.
2 * Technical folks and their managers with a geospatial orientation
but little open source experience, looking to improve their
understanding of the field and apply that knowledge in their work
place.
3 * Actual hackers of geospatial open source in its myriad varieties,
promoters of open data, card carrying members of the free knowledge
ecosystem.

In 2007 and 2009 a public voting system provided information back to
the committee about the relative popularity of various talks and
topics. To some extent this data was used to choose which papers to
allocation presentation time to -- however, final decisions were made
by a traditional program committee. It was also used very successfully
to place talks into suitably sized  venues. In 2010 this will be
especially important, since your largest venue has 10x the capacity of
your smallest -- making a venue allocation mistake will result in
unhappy attendees standing in halls and aisles, and/or occasionally
dramatically underused large halls.

In that respect, the "academic track" idea has a one-size-fits-all
problem. There will be some "academic" talks that will have a
potentially very large audience. And vice versa.  My personal feeling
is that what should distinguish the academic from other entries is not
where they are presented, but that they are vetted by an academic
committee prior to acceptance, that they require a formal paper to go
with them, and that they do end up being published. In 2007, an issue
of the OSGeo Journal was devoted to that purpose.

Anyhow, all that to second Volker: the information from the public
process is very valuable. The process can be managed fairly
scientifically, the messaging (aim it at "if you're planning to attend
FOSS4G please come and express your preferences" rather than "come
one, come all") can be aligned to produce useful results, and the
final decisions can and should be left to a smaller committee than can
implement strategic aims (draw in introductory topics, massage
sponsors, etc). However, without the public data, fun talks like this
one, couldn't happen: http://2007.foss4g.org/plenaries/lightning/#erle

Best,

Paul

On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 4:01 AM, Volker Mische <volker.mische at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Lorenzo, Marco,
>
> Lorenzo Becchi wrote:
>> This is not a definitive opinion but we think it would be really
>> complicated to manage the voting system if, as we expect, we will
>> receive a lot more of proposal than the previous conferences.
>> We are thinking to leave the selection in the hands of the scientific
>> committee, we already have the platform and we are moving to create
>> committee as faster as possible.
>
> The academic track should, of course, be selected from an academic
> committee. But I think the general track should be selected differently.
> For me the FOSS4G is a mainly geek conference with potential to do some
> business. So the selection should be made by geeks (public voting) and a
> special committee (OC/OSGeo/other people who know about the Open Source
> _business_) to get some presentations in that are valuable for potential
> partners and/or are interesting for government representatives (as a
> major partner of Open Source are governments).
>
> I agree, the public voting won't be easy, and the interface would need
> to be changed as no one can go through all Abstracts. Alternatively the
> public voting could be replaced with another committee that does the
> selection, but that one should be open for everyone to join. Then that
> committee can decide who is reviewing which part of the huge about of
> submissions.
>
> Cheers,
>  Volker
>
> _______________________________________________
> Foss4g2010 mailing list
> Foss4g2010 at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/foss4g2010
>