[Foss4g2010] BoF at FOSS4G

[Cameron Shorter]

Yes Volker, good point.
I collected my thoughts about BOF sessions here:

http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_Lessons_Learned#Birds_of_a_Feather

    * We had one official "Birds of a Feather" session on Thursday
      afternoon. We had a wiki page for people to sign up for the Birds
      of a Feather before hand, but this wasn't used much.
      http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_BirdsOfAFeather
    * We also had sign up sheets at the OSGeo stand, and that was used.
      We had many people wanting to go to a number of the sessions, and
      a couple of sessions were moved to different timeslots.
    * The description "Birds of a Feather" was not understood by many
      people and they needed to have the term explained to them. This is
      an issue for people looking at the program before hand and wanting
      to determine whether they should come to the session or not. Maybe
      use "Interest Groups" instead.
    * I, Cameron Shorter, organised 5 meetings of like minded people
      over dinner, breakfast and during the code sprint. (Meetings
      around Defence, Water, SDI implementers, GeoSpatial Businesses,
      OSGeo Marketing). I had the advantage of having access to the
      registration list, and hence could invite people individually.
      Even so, my skim over the lists was rushed and I'm sure I missed
      half the people who should have been at these gatherings. These
      meetings were very successful, with almost everyone invited
      attending, and I had many thank me for inviting them and noting
      that they found the meetings very valuable. So lessons for next year:
          o Provide a list of local restaurants beforehand, and invite
            delegates to set up "Interest Group" meetings at these
            restaurants for breakfast and dinner during the conference.
          o Someone with access to the delegate list should go through
            and email delegates individually and suggest meetings they
            may be interested in. (I used email domain names and my
            personal knowledge of delegate affiliations to identify
            likely interest). Someone also suggested that we could do
            some smart analysis of how people vote for abstracts.
            Alternatively, we could ask delegates to tick areas of
            interest when the register.
          o Note that the size of the group effects its effectiveness. A
            group of 8 allows people to talk with each other. If you
            have a group of 20, then you will want to give people a
            chance to move around. (For a dinner group of 25, we had
            people mingle while having drinks before dinner, then
            invited delegates to change seats between dinner and desert).




Volker Mische wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> are there already plans for the Birds of a Feather sessions? I've a
> quick note that it would be good if there would be more than one time
> slot. E.g. there are more and more OpenLayer based projects that would
> like to have a BoF, but most people are in one than more project.
>
> Cheers,
>   Volker
> _______________________________________________
> Foss4g2010 mailing list
> Foss4g2010 at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/foss4g2010
>   


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Systems Architect
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

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