International user groups

[Tyler Mitchell]

Just re-sending this message directly to this list.  I would love to hear more 
about how people are already organising regional user groups.

The only one I'm involved is a sort of virtual user group for Western 
US/Canada, mostly focused on MapServer - we don't meet, we just use a mailing 
list when people have ideas/questions.

Tyler

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: [OSGeo-Discuss] International user groups
Date: February 10, 2006 09:29
From: Tyler Mitchell <tjm at timberline.ca>
To: discuss at lists.osgeo.org

One thing I would really like to see in the mid/long-term is the
foundation supporting the development of regional, national and
international user groups.

Some countries and cities already have successful ones.  We have a
successful international conference.  Other groups just need some more
moral support, guidance/encouragement or maybe some infrastructure to
help get things going.  My dream is to have at least one OSGeo user
group representative from every country and then provide casual venues
for them to meet together in a regional context.  I'm thinking about
this at the moment because of the international
membership/representation issues being brought up.  Having a relatively
small number of members in the foundation means we can't expect to have
extremely broad international representation among the membership.  Even
if we strive to, it will be hard for members to vote for new
international members who they've never met or dealt with before.

If groups can be developed over the next year or so, then those groups
would be an ideal place for the broader foundation community to get to
know more projects and people internationally.  It would come quite
naturally.

While I think it is a good idea to have broad international
representation, it is going to be hard to get so early in the game.  We
had representatives from at least 5 countries in Chicago - I believe
that's a very good start.  Two board members are from Europe, that is
very good as well.

  An organised, globally dispersed, set of user groups will help
everyone settle in.  OSGeo is a global party - it's going to take some
time to mingle and meet everyone because the party just got started.

Just some food for thought, hopefully we can come back to this idea
after our initial structure is up and running.

Tyler


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