[OSGeo-UK] Minutes from OSGeo:UK chapter AGM

[Jo Cook]

Many thanks to everyone who attended the OSGeo:UK 3rd AGM at OSGIS in
Nottingham today. Here's some short minutes for those that couldn't make it.

Chapter membership (using the mailing list as the only available metric) has
increased from 80-115 over the last year. This surpasses what we hoped for-
which was to pass the 100 mark, so thanks to all the new people who have got
involved!

The big success in terms of community building has been our regular IRC
meetings. These take place monthly on the #osgeo-uk channel, on the last
monday of the month, between 1 and 2PM GMT (or BST as appropriate). We get a
regular group of around 15 people, and it's the best place to find out about
events, training etc.

The Association for Geographic Information have kindly agreed to provide a
bank account for us. This is a role they extend to a number of smaller
geospatial organisations in the UK, and it's extremely helpful as it means
we don't need to worry about the infrastructure needed to do this ourselves.
We have had a number of donations this year, which is extremely kind and has
allowed us to begin producing marketing materials such as our conference
banner, and also to begin sponsoring some small events such as the AGI
Northern Group meeting on open source geospatial software that took place on
June 16th.

We have begun asking for case studies, and have produced a template to make
it as easy as possible for people to do this. We have received around 8 this
year, with a number of others "promised". These are all available on our
website.

Our plans for the next 12 months are to build on the great foundations of
the last year. We need to come up with some fund-raising targets and
mechanisms, to allow us to continue producing marketing materials and
sponsoring events. If we wish to host FOSS4G in the UK in 2013 then we need
to submit an expression of interest in June next year.

We are going to set up a code repository under the OSGeo banner, to allow us
to host a number of UK specific small pieces of code such as the Ordnance
Survey Mastermap Loader and QGis plugin that are being developed
collaboratively by Astun Technology, Faunalia and the Ordnance Survey.

We are also going to start producing monthly press releases, probably
following on from the monthly IRC meeting. These will be distributed to the
UK Geospatial Press. We are also going to focus our "social media"
attentions on LinkedIn and Twitter rather than Facebook. Volunteers are
requested to help with keeping these channels up to date and relevant, via
our twitter hashtag #osgeouk or by contributing news items to the LinkedIn
group.

I think that's about it- again many thanks to all those that attended- I
hope you all had a great conference and I hope to see you all in September
2012 if not before!

Thanks

Jo

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