[OSGeo Oceania] [Oceania-Board] Community Recognition Process

[Adam Steer]

Hiya everyone

I really appreciate the desire to recognise great efforts in the
community. I'm gonna be that person who asks 'is an award really a
thing to start up in 2023'? My next line of thought is 'is this
sustainable for a small-ish volunteer community? who is going to look
after this in 5 years or even 2 years time?'

There's already been a short discussion about how awards get skewed
(starting at [1], particularly well expressed in [2]). Effort
sustainability is additional concern.

In a related discussion in another forum I wondered if, instead of
awards, a whole conference could be devoted to community building and
celebration of each others' acheivements.

One way to implement that might be to only accept talks where a team
presents about a project, software, a map, a team who inspires them -
which is not their own (or from the same company). And/or teams set up
to discuss community and cultural parts of being an open source
geospatial participant. Its a way of our community recognising others,
and a way of doing work to sustain itself.

This is a fairly audacious departure from what (especially in
Australia) a mapping and technology conference is evolving into, it
might also be audacious enough to work.

A program committee will likely have a lot of work to do in ensuring
small-yet-critical projects - the one proposal that wants to talk
about proj, and the other one about geos, versus 4326 about QGIS and
another 28355 about whatever the hot new tech of the year is.

Maybe just another too-far-out-there idea, maybe food for thought.

Cheers,

Adam

[1] https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/oceania/2023-March/002822.html
[2] https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/oceania/2023-March/002827.html


--
Dr Adam Steer
https://iamadamsteer.com