[North America] North America conference discussion

[Landon Blake]

In the future, if we want to come to California, I could find out
about pairing with the California Land Surveyors Annual Conference. I
know the chair of the organization's GIS committee.

Just a thought to shelve for the future.

Landon

On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 10:55 AM, Paul Ramsey <pramsey at opengeo.org> wrote:
> Very excited about this, love Denver.
> P.
>
> On Mon, Nov 28, 2011 at 4:31 AM, Mark Lucas <mlucas17 at mac.com> wrote:
>> I've been receiving a lot of good comments and have been asking that they be
>> moved out to the list for broader discussion.
>>
>> Most of the comments revolve around how to estimate the initial conference
>> and set expectations properly.  Most of those recommendations encourage
>> mitigation of risk and marketing the first conference as a start up event
>> and essentially a launching pad for a much more aggressive 2013 conference.
>>
>> To mitigate risk it appears that working with GITA in Denver, before or
>> after another distinct GITA event in Apr / May would be best at minimizing
>> the overall workload and financial risk.  I've reached out to Tyler, Peter,
>> Dave and others as we have bounced ideas back and forth and modified the
>> last conference spreadsheet to get an initial handle on overall budget.
>>
>> The biggest driver is the estimated number of attendees.  Peter has provided
>> survey information from the foss4g conference so that we could see what the
>> interests, comments, and geographical distribution of the attendees were.
>>  Current thinking seems to be settling around 200-300, possibly expanding to
>> 500 attendees.
>>
>> As we have always done, we also want to take advantage of other
>> organizations and conferences to further spread our message.  The eclipse
>> foundation, mil-oss, USGIF, and GITA are all potential collaborators in this
>> and future activities.  MIL-OSS indicated that they could help organize a
>> parallel track for the conference.  They typically attract around 100 people
>> to each of their working groups.
>>
>> We have been in initial discussions with GITA and it appears there may be a
>> straight forward plan to host our first event.  I'd like to see if we can
>> continue and open up many of these discussions over the next week or so and
>> make a decision to kick the effort off after the next board meeting on 8
>> Dec.  The timeframe is very short and we'd like to get sponsorship material
>> and early signup rates out before the end of the year.
>>
>>
>>
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