All,
Wednesday this week is time for Marketing IRC meeting but I might not be able to make it due to travel. Please go ahead anyway.
Hi Percy,
at the last meeting we did not get around to talk about this so I wanted to bring it up on the list again. Comments inline.
percy wrote:
Tyler thought I should join the marketing committee so we could talk about OSGEO presence at OSCON in Portland this year. I've represented OSGEO in this capacity for the last two years.
Excellent, any kind of continuity is good. Next thing is you try to "build" a group of people around who can do the same thing in a year where you'd rather go on vacations. Obviously groups don't get built but they coagulate around a crystallization node, etc.
Since AutoDesk isn't sponsoring a booth this year, I thought I'd get creative and see what we could come up with.
IBM sponsors a booth for PSU every year, usually. Bart Massey from our CS dept is in charge of it (and, incidentally, Goog SOC), and he gets student volunteers to staff the booth and talk about OS at PSU. Also, Oregon State's Open Source Labs (OSL) is usually at that booth. This year Bart has agreed, over lunch today, to have us focus on open source GIS. So I will help corral some students and we'll talk about our web-mapping products. I assume we'll put up the OSGEO banner and have pamplets.
Excellent. Do you have a banner? If not Marketing should be able to make one and ship it to you or - even better - only refund your expenses. In the latter case you should get an offer beforehand and let Marketing know how much it will be so that we can check with our budget (a moving target anyway). I suggest that this banner would then stay with you so that you can reuse it for presentations, conferences, etc. and give it to people in your vicinity for the same purposes. Shipping them around is probably more expensive and less reliable in the long run. There are some images of the banners we have used so far in the Wiki (but it is down again right now).
Tim Welch from EcoTrust has also offered to help. He was one of our PSU student volunteers last year, and now has a real job doing development using most OSGEO tools. (maybe he should be a case study).
Excellent, thats a good idea. Maybe we could make him our first live, interactive exhibit (like colts in petting zoos). (Disclaimer: I am trying to be funny, if this is objectionable in your culture I apologize... 
Anyway... I think a BOF where we show off some cool apps, maybe do some lighting talks would be nice. Perhaps OSGEO could pay for some food or drink for that, and rent a projector...
Renting a projector is not a problem, again you should first let us know how much that would be (any maybe first check whether the university can lend one). I am unsure about money for food/drink because it is harder to argument how much for how many and why and so on. Maybe we need to bring this up as a general question again in an IRC meeting.
And a pass to the conference that we could all share would be a nice perk!
First try to get a few from the organizer of the conference, the university or IBM or all four of them. If that does not work let this list know how many you need and at what cost, we can then check sponsors or pay for them.
Hope this answers a few questions.
Best regards, Arnulf.
Cheers,
Percy
percy wrote:
Sorry I'm late, having network problems. I'm David Percy, GeoSpatial Data Manager for the Geology Dept at Portland State University. Tyler thought I should join the marketing committee so we could talk about OSGEO presence at OSCON in Portland this year. I've represented OSGEO in this capacity for the last two years.
Michael P. Gerlek wrote:
Wednesday at 2pm for me, I'll try to be there.
-mpg