[OSGeo-Board] Re: People at FOSS4G

[Jo Walsh]

On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 09:57:57AM -0700, Tyler Mitchell wrote:
> I'm hearing two different requests here:
> 1-to help support some others to go to FOSS4G and EuroOSCON
> 2-to bring in more help to fill volunteer holes at the two conferences.  

Right, 2 is rather become the 'excuse vector' for 1.
 
> Perhaps you are thinking more of a fund that is less tethered to promotion and more benevolent in nature?

I'm thinking of a benevolent fund, yes, and then looking at the budget
document and thinking "well, there's an allocation which looks like
what I have in mind and has the same sort of name". I'm thinking that
travel expenses is a good way to support "people we like". "Promotion"
is a difficult word for me and I'd maybe say "representation".

> As an aside, I'd much rather see promo funds go toward helping
> establish regional meetups than to just help keep people flocking
> around the world to the venue of the month.

(Well, this is why I'd like to have several OSGeo conferences in
different regions next year! But most people seem to think that they'd 
rather go to only one that they knew "everyone" was going to be at.)
 
> I would at least like to see any funds used to bring in more help be
> focused on local people.  The reality is that a pseudo-OSGeo-related
> conference or regional user group is coming soon ... to a venue near
> you.  

This does make sense. But then this becomes a different kind of
support; we are talking more about conference organising support. 
Locals don't need travel support so much - they can spare equiv. 50-100
on train fares, know local people to stay with.  
 
> I'm not saying we shouldn't try to find support for the two Jo
> mentioned, or try to give more incentive to build up our presence -
> but I just wanted to lay out my perspective and ask a few more
> questions.

Nod. Yes, I'd like to clearly phrase my question about finding support for 
Andrew Turner to attend FOSS4G as primarily "we think you're doing good stuff"
(He reminds everyone of a younger Chris Schmidt. He was doing GeoRSS
early on and is now getting sucked in to harder GIS, if you're on the
geowanking list you'll have seen him talking with Ari about doing a 
cross-language survey of geospatial libraries and tools, helping perl and 
ruby catch up with python etc. I think his work would engage people.)

If this is yet another point where a request for a decision prompts a
request for policy to make future decisions easier and this one
better, that's fine too, and any advice about how one might find this
lad sponsorship on a corporate basis, would be much appreciated. 

cheers,


jo