[FOSS4G2016] update 20.04.2016

[Till Adams]

Hi all,

there are some things coming motion now, so I think it is adequate to 
inform you.

Last friday I had a meeting with the chapter for business development of 
the city of bonn, with Prof. Klaus Gereve and also Bonn Tourist GmbH.

Mr. Greve is the person organizing the EARSeL conference and also helps 
in our organisation.

First of all I asked the city representatives about possible locations 
for the workshops. They will care for that for now and will come back 
with a list of possible locations. I think that makes things much easier 
and wil lhelp us to get access to cheaper locaitons, because they come 
from a more officially side.

Second, Mr. Greve and I reported about our idea to connect both 
conferences - at least by "exchanging" a track inside the programme. The 
next idea is to conect these single events by a common "roof", e.g. 
called "Bonner summer of GIS" or something that sounds even better (any 
ideas?)

Generally the city of Bonn is very interested in such a "GIS event2 - in 
sight of business development, in sight of promoting Bonn as conference 
city and also to promite the Bonner Geo-Cluster. So in the moment we are 
looking for even more "geo"-related events being put in our 
time-framework and want to create a lot of attention via press 
statements and so on. This will also help us getting more people and 
also for finding sponsors.

Also Mr. Greve worked a lot in sight of getting the "UN branding" for 
both conferences and also he worked on the possibility to get some of 
the "UN reserved contingent" from WCCB especially for FOSs4G. This would 
save us a lot of money.
So this dream is still alive, we're working on that!


Inside FOSSGIS e.V. we've found a decision on how and in which 
constellation we will run the conference. The last discussed 
opportunities were either doing this as FOSSGIS e.V. with a seperate 
bank account. We were a little bit anxious about the bunch of money 
overrunning our normal financial movemets about ten to twenty times and 
the reaction of the finance office, because we do not want to risk our 
common public interest status.

To prevent us from that, there is the possibility of getting a binding 
information from the financial office.

The second alternative would be to found a new company, the "FOSSGIS 
GmbH"  which in the end would organize the conference and would be shut 
down afterwards. Also a sure idea, but that would close the door for 
saving some taxes.

So our plans in the moment are, to try to get a positive binding 
information. This might help us saving some taxes (I wrote about that in 
the proposal as you for sure all read ;-))

If this will not work, we are going to found a company.
In general both opportunities will give us a safe base for our acting, 
but of course there is a catch - it will take some weeks to fix either 
opportunity and in this time, we can't open a bank account, we can't 
make any binding contracts. I've communicated this already to PCO and 
also to WCCB (and witrh this also to OSGeo ;-)) - until then we can't 
request any money from OSGeo as well (and we couldn't spend it at all)

Last, there is the FOSSGIS hacking weekend where I will talk to the 
chair of the Küstenschmiede, who offered to create the webpage for 
FOSS4G. Anybody else intereseted in joining us? See:
http://www.fossgis.de/wiki/FOSSGIS_Hacking_Event_2015_Nummer_3


So long,

Till