[Industry] [OSGeo-Discuss] Board meeting 2014-07-17: minutes

[Even Rouault]

Hi,

Happy to read a bit more about this, after yesterday Gérald's passionate 
introduction at the OSGeo board meeting.
 
Sorry in advance: the rest of this email will be mostly with questions. 
Hopefully they will be seen as constructive.

> about OSGeo-Europe:
> -----------------------------
> Although I know there are several local chapters having their own legal
> structure, I want to break a lance for maintaining one team, one group
> of #people, one #OSGeo. Local chapters are a good thing and should be
> promoted, but the strength of open source is to share and to help each
> other to create strong technology, public available source code,
> documentation, idea's, fun and friendships. I want to break a lance than
> to go further what we do today, and really bridge gaps between the
> different projects, but that are thoughts for another topic, another
> time ...
> 
> Last week I heard several comments on the restrictions a US based legal
> non for profit organisation has, and the will and feeling that OSGeo
> could do more, if we decide better and clearly what to do with the
> money. It should be used in steering the GIS Open Source Future in the
> right direction.

Right directionS perhaps ;-) ? I can imagine that there can be several 
parallel paths.

> These remarks and comments did me think of creating a European Fund.
> 
> - having a US based org and a EU based Fund will spread the organisation
> in an organic way further over the globe.
> - Money can be collected from sponsoring activities into the fund.

Probably hard to determine at the moment, but an idea of the amount that could 
be collected ? Apart from European commission are there other sources of 
funding that are identified ?

> - A European fund should be able to participate in European programs
> such as Horizon2020 and others. [to be investigated]
> - The money can be governed by the EU Fund, but the decisions what we
> should do with the money could be decided by the board of OSGeo,

I'm not completely sure to understand what you mean here. You mean that the 
OSGeo board would give recommandations on how money managed by the fund should 
generally be used, but that the budget itself and its day to day management 
would be the responsibility of the fund ?
Not speaking for them of course!, but I'm wondering if the OSGeo board would 
be willing to do that since the fund will be of regional scope. Imagine that 
there are such funds on all continents, that would give the board quite a lot 
to look after, and the board is probably busy enough.
More generally, what do you imagine as a link between the OSGeo foundation and 
the Fund: something similar to what exists between OSGeo and its local 
chapters ? so basically the fund would have full autonomy, and would benefit 
from official recognition from OSGeo, provided it respects the 
http://www.osgeo.org/content/chapters/guidelines.html

> respecting certain rules:
> 
> - Specific European funded projects still need a budget to complete, so
> the fund can be used to complete these budgets
> - With the available money, OSGeo can sponsor innovative idea's, where a
> valorisation factor can be included. Innovative idea's can be sponsored
> by a vehicle that understands the needs of an Open Source Business.
> - If a project is successful it should result in new value for the fund,
> giving more budget to sponsor other innovative projects. This should be
> managed like a professional investment fund, so that the balance remains
> positive and the leverage OSGeo can maintain on open source related
> business grows year after year.

Something like X % of the value generated by the project (how to define that 
precisely would be hard I think) initially supported by the fund would get 
back to the fund ? Sound similar to a policy that was followed by the 
sponsorhip program of some OSGeo projects where 25% of the funds collected by 
the project would return to OSGeo.
Actually this raises another question: would the fund potentially give some 
part of its revenue to the OSGeo foundation itself (as FOSS4G does) ?

> 
> I think I can help setting up a team that has the right technical and
> legal expertise to create such a vehicle.

An idea on how the fund would be governed ? Likely a bootstrapping phase to 
determine initial members and then a process to make it evolve.

The fund members would have to select proposals that request to benefit from 
funds. Do you have an idea on the decision process ? As money will be 
involved, I can imagine that is something that can be tricky to establish, to 
avoid bad feelings, conflict of interests, etc...

Best regards,

Even

-- 
Geospatial professional services
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