[Journal] Board Support and Proposed Plan for the Journal Moving Forward

[Landon Blake]

Journal Team:

Please see the response from the OSGeo Board to my inquiry on the
future of the Journal. It doesn't appear the Board feels strongly
about the role of the Journal in the overall strategy of the
organization. This was disappointing to me, but after a pep talk from
Tyler I realize this is only as limiting as we allow it to be. I still
feel strongly that the Journal has an important role to play in the
following ways:

(1) Raising awareness of OSGeo projects, chapters, and events.
(2) Providing a channel for the publication of peer-reviewed articles
related to open source geospatial technologies.

The biggest challenge for me moving forward, now that Tyler is no
longer the executive director, will be finding the time to put
together a quality publication. I think I need to scale back my
ambitions for the journal, even though that is a hard thing for me to
do, if we are going to be successful, at least in the short term. Here
is what I would like to propose:

(1) We publish an annual report each year by the end of the first
quarter, highlighting OSGeo project and chapter activities from the
previous calendar year.
.
(2) We publish an issue of the journal with peer-reviewed content by
the end of the third quarter in each year.

I believe I can make a tentative commitment to serving as editor for
each of these two (2) annual issues. Tyler said he would help with an
issue covering FOSS4G proceedings. If we find more energy and
volunteers, we can do more, but I think the two (2) issues a year will
be all I can handle on my plate for the foreseeable future.

I'm going to shuffle some responsibilities at work this week so I can
get the PDF version of the Journal out by the end of the week. It has
lingered too long and I need to just put out the material I have
available now.

We can then shoot for our goal of producing the 2011 Annual Report by
the end of the third quarter.

Please let me know if you can help with the conversion of the 2010
Annual Report to HTML/EPUB, or if you want to start collection 2011
annual report items from chapters and projects.

Thanks for your continued support and patience.

Landon


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Frank Warmerdam <warmerdam at pobox.com>
Date: Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 12:49 PM
Subject: Re: [Board] Questions about the OSGeo Journal Post Tyler Mitchell
To: Landon Blake <sunburned.surveyor at gmail.com>
Cc: Board at lists.osgeo.org


Landon,

The board discussed the role of the Journal in the context of the
broader realm of OSGeo activities and in light of the currently
volunteer and staff resources.  Even when Tyler was available to
do quite a bit of work it was still a struggle to get the Journal out
in a timely fashion.

So our position is that the journal isn't all that strategic to the
foundation and barring volunteers wanting to pursue it we should
scale back.

I'd like to see the existing 2010 report finished up and I'm willing
to work personally with you on it.

Best regards,
Frank