[osgeo-ph] Fwd: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo Board Priorities

[maning sambale]

An excellent summary of OSGeo Interantional Board Priorities for the
coming years.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Cameron Shorter <cameron.shorter at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 7:44 AM
Subject: [OSGeo-Discuss] OSGeo Board Priorities
To: OSGeo Discussions <discuss at lists.osgeo.org>, OSGeo-Board List
<board at lists.osgeo.org>


A productive virtual meeting of the OSGeo Board resulted in general
consensus over OSGeo's priorities, which in turn should help the OSGeo
Board and OSGeo committees when guiding OSGeo into the future.

These principles are:

OSGeo should act as a low capital, volunteer focused organisation.
OSGeo should focus support on OSGeo communities and initiatives which
support themselves.

Current priority areas include:

Global, regional and local FOSS4G related events, or events which
include a FOSS4G stream.
Marketing OSGeo, which is currently focused around OSGeo-Live.
Education, which is currently focused around the network of Open
Source Geospatial Research and Education Laboratories.
Local Chapters, as outreach initiatives are typically driven at the local level.

So lets expand on these:

OSGeo as a low capital, volunteer focused organisation

Should OSGeo act as a high capital or low capital organisation? I.e.,
should OSGeo dedicate energy to collecting sponsorship and then
passing out these funds to worthy OSGeo causes.

While initially it seems attractive to have OSGeo woe sponsors,
because we would all love to have more money to throw at worthy OSGeo
goals, the reality is that chasing money is hard work. And someone who
can chase OSGeo sponsorship is likely conflicted with chasing
sponsorship for their particular workplace. So in practice, to be
effective in chasing sponsorship, OSGeo will probably need to hire
someone specifically for the role. OSGeo would then need to raise at
least enough to cover wages, and then quite a bit more if the
sponsorship path is to create extra value.

This high capital path is how the Eclipse foundation is set up, and
how LocationTech propose to organise themselves. It is the path that
OSGeo started following when founded under the umbrella of Autodesk.

However, over the last seven years, OSGeo has slowly evolved toward a
low capital volunteer focused organisation. Our overheads are very
low, which means we waste very little of our volunteer labour and
capital on the time consuming task of chasing and managing money.
Consequently, any money we do receive (from conference windfalls or
sponsorship) goes a long way - as it doesn't get eaten up by high
overheads. As discussed and agreed by the board, this low capital path
is something that is working very well for us, and is the path we
should continue to follow.

Support initiatives which support themselves

With the thousands of great initiatives and opportunities that OSGeo
could get involved in, and limited budget, how should OSGeo set
funding priorities? Acknowledging that our volunteer community is
blessed with many talented individuals, our most effective way to tap
into community potential is to welcome individuals to "help scratch
their itch". Extending on this, funding priorities should follow the
actions of already successful communities. (Note the difference
between "talk" and "action"). If a task or project is important
enough, it will attract volunteers and/or sponsors to make it happen.
In practice, this will usually equate to providing co-contributions
rather than outright funding.

OSGeo's focus should be on initiatives which are of value to all or
most OSGeo projects, and to get best value for our limited budget,
OSGeo should target initiatives which have high value with minimal
investment.

With that in mind our priorities should be:

Cover the costs of running OSGeo: Bank fees, insurance,
infrastructure, hosting etc.
Support marketing and out reach activities, with a primary focus on
our FOSS4G global conference, followed by regional and then local
FOSS4G or related events.
Educational type activities are a high priority, but likely will be a
minimal cost activity from OSGeo's perspective.
Other initiatives which fit our priorities, as suggested by membership.

Initiatives which probably wouldn't quality:

Sponsoring core development of a particular project. (Too expensive,
and only supports one project)
OSGeo speaker travel expenses, or booth registration costs at a
conference. (If conferences/local community feel this is important,
they will either: 1. pay for the keynote, 2. make use of local talent,
3. waive fees for our non-profit, 4. find a local sponsor)

Conferences and related events

Conferences are financially risky events. They need to be planned well
in advance, and you are never sure how many people will turn up, or
whether some global event will have a substantial impact on
registrations. Consequently, conferences such as FOSS4G require
financial guarantees up front in order to secure a venue. To support
and enable these conferences, OSGeo will endevour to retain sufficient
capital to offer such guarantees for any FOSS4G event requesting it.
If OSGeo's support is requested, then OSGeo would expect these events
to budget for a modest profit under conservative estimates, and for
OSGeo to retain profits from such events. To date, such profits, while
relatively modest, have been OSGeo's primary income source.

Other spatial conferences regularly request an OSGeo involvement, such
as providing presenters, workshops, OSGeo-Live DVDs for distribution,
or providing a booth. OSGeo facilitates such requests to the level we
can achieve with interested volunteers, but typically expects the
conference or sponsors to cover expenses.

OSGeo has limited budget set aside for code sprints, which are seen as
a valuable forum for given directly back to development teams. OSGeo
will typically expect co-contributions from interested sponsors, and
would prefer to support code sprints which are of benefit to multiple
projects and communities.

Education

OSGeo is very supportive of educational initiatives which is helping
the spread of OSGeo to students across the globe. This is currently
focused around the growing network of Open Source Geospatial Research
and Education Laboratories within Universities around the world.

This educational initiative is currently progressing well without
requiring OSGeo's financial support.

Packaging and Marketing

OSGeo's marketing effort has primarily been focused around the
packaging and documentation efforts of OSGeo-Live, and to a lesser
extend, osgeo4w. In 2012, OSGeo-Live was used at 45 events without
OSGeo's financial support. It has been entirely driven by volunteer
labour, by 140 OSGeo-Live volunteers, and printing costs have been
covered by local events or sponsors.

In the last couple of years, OSGeo has covered local chapter expenses
required to purchase non-consumable items for conference booths (such
as a retractable banner).

In moving forward, OSGeo hope to extend marketing reach by providing
co-contributions toward printing costs of consumable items at
conferences, such as toward OSGeo-Live DVDs.

Local Chapters

Much of OSGeo's marketing initiates are applied at the local level. In
many cases, this is best supported through as little as an email list
and wiki page. OSGeo also supports local chapters by offering to pay
for an Exhibition starter pack for local chapters. Local chapters are
also usually the coordinators of conferences and related events, as
mentioned above.

Sponsorship

OSGeo will continue to welcome sponsorship. Due to OSGeo's low capital
model, we are able to make sponsor's contribution provide substantial
benefit to the greater OSGeo community. In return, we promote
sponsors' logos on our website and through our OSGeo-Live marketing
pipeline (which was used at 45 geospatial events around the world in
2012).

However, OSGeo is doesn't plan to either task volunteers with
specifically chasing sponsors, or hire someone to chase sponsorship on
OSGeo's behalf.


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-- 
cheers,
maning
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