[Marketing] Report from the OSGeo stand at the Federation of Surveyors conference

[Cameron Shorter]

http://cameronshorter.blogspot.com/2010/04/report-from-osgeo-stand-at-federation.html

The international Federation of Surveyors conference finished last week 
in Sydney, attracting well over 2000 delegates and by all accounts was a 
great success. Congratulations to the organisors.
I spent most of my time at the OSGeo booth promoting Open Source and 
Open Standards, presented a 15 minute lightening presentation titled 
"GeoSpatial Open Source for Surveyors", http://blip.tv/file/3503561, and 
attended some Open Source presentations.
At the booth I was helped by Chris Body (OGC Standards representative at 
GeoSciences Australia), Darren Motollini (West Australia's Shared Land 
Information Platform (SLIP)), Gertrude Pieper (FLOSS-Cadastre Expert 
Group at FAO/FIG Commission) and Lee Hughes from LISAsoft. We were armed 
with:

    * An OSGeo Banner
    * A stack of OSGeo Live DVDs
    * Some OSGeo fliers let over from FOSS4G 2009
    * Some 52 North fliers we inherited after FOSS4G
    * As well as some Open Source Support fliers from LISAsoft.

The LiveDVDs were very popular with everyone we talked to at the stand. 
I heard reports of people being seen showing the LiveDVD to people they 
were sitting next to while watching presentations. And we had a number 
of people coming up to the stand asking for the LiveDVD. I was concerned 
we were going to run out of DVDs, so I ensured we only had 10 or so DVDs 
on display at a time.
One of the 52 North fliers had "Open Source" prominently displayed on 
the front, and people were picking up this flier first, rather than 
looking at some of the other fliers, which probably would have been more 
appropriate for their particular use cases. Lesson: People recognise 
"Open Source" and don't recognise "OSGeo", so marketing material should 
adjust emphasis to include Open Source in a large font.
There were many surveyors keen to try out open source, who were asking 
for direction as to which desktop GIS tools they should use. Lesson: 
There appears to be a relatively untapped market for Surveyors looking 
for Open Source Software, for anyone prepared to step up and support 
this industry.

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

Think Globally, Fix Locally
Geospatial Solutions enhanced with Open Standards and Open Source
http://www.lisasoft.com