People at FOSS4G

Committees Marketing
1

Jo Walsh wrote:

dear all,

There are a couple of people who I wish I could find some kind of
financial support for to travel to FOSS4G and EuroOSCON who would be
reallu useful to have there and are doing good work for open source
geospatial and OSGeo. I don't know whether it would be appropriate for
the foundation to have a travel grant fund - it might be a bit
hard to get sponsorship for. I'm thinking something very limited for
people who really could benefit from the support. Or if this is a
mechanism we could establish and use soon enough in time for these
events.

I see in the budget there is a slot for "Promotional travel"(18KUSD) and i think that is what this would constitute. One of the people i have in
mind is working a lot on FDO and would be a poster child at EuroOSCON for open source community interexchange with MapGuide. The other is
a whiz kid working on GeoRSS who had a paper accepted at FOSS4G but
is in the very rural midwest and it's a big expense. He could come and
make lots of interesting mashup stuff, sitting around on the booth there.

We're in a position to support / release funds for this sort of thing? Or if this is a bit widespread or too soon, can anyone suggest how
these people *might* find travel support from other organisations?

cheers,

jo

Hi,
the response from projects to help staff booths at FOSS4G and EuroOSCON has been near void. As Visibility is one of the key missions of OSGeo I would very much support tapping into our VisCom budget to get people help staff the booth.

Besides that it gives us a good chance to integrate those people to our goals individually. I'll be hanging around the booth all the time anyway. People who had a chance to profit from OSGeo are better volunteers. As we can see the bulk of work in OSGeo is done by a few, we need to get more. Paying people full time is one way to do it, giving incentives is easier and does not bind any money we don't have yet.

btw: I have heard lots of "oh why are we only a volunteer organization" moans. There is some educating reading regarding the definition of volunteer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer which might help to understand why volunteers are the best thing that can happen to us from a governance and long term visionary perspective. Especially in highly automized societies volunteer work is becoming more and more important... sorry, I am rambling.

I must confess that results from requests for support so far have been disappointing (volunteers suck), even switching gender did not help (or shied them away :-).

Gary,
if you feel you cannot hit reply immediately, I would like to bring in a motion at the next board meeting to use ~2.5k from the travel budget to be spent for travel costs for volunteers at the FOSS4G and EuroOSCON booths. (is that enough, Jo? Can you get more precise numbers?)

Regards,
Arnulf (aka Seven)

2

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.

It would help to dissect these a bit - more below...

Jo wrote:

> I don't know whether it would be appropriate for
> the foundation to have a travel grant fund - it might be a bit
> hard to get sponsorship for. I'm thinking something very limited for
> people who really could benefit from the support.

In a way, this has already been happening, starting with the Chicago meeting, where Autodesk sponsored travel for many to make it to various meetings. Obviously it's been ad hoc, and not done formally through a request to OSGeo, but has been very helpful for OSGeo. This hasn't been tied to the OSGeo promo budget though. I just mention it so that we don't think there has been money spent from our primary sponsor to allow for this already.

When the promo/travel budget was discussed earlier I thought it was more in the context of sending representatives places where there would otherwise be a less effective (or non existant) OSGeo presence. I think it should be tied pretty tightly to specific events where OSGeo will clearly gain from a promo perspective and where that promo isn't covered off by others already.

Perhaps you are thinking more of a fund that is less tethered to promotion and more benevolent in nature?

Arnulf wrote:

the response from projects to help staff booths at FOSS4G and
EuroOSCON has been near void. As Visibility is one of the key missions of
OSGeo I would very much support tapping into our VisCom budget to get
people help staff the booth.

Are the 'free' passes to the conference not enough to encourage more volunteers? Or do we not have enough passes? Maybe I'm wrongly assuming Europe is just full of FOSS folks ready to volunteer if they get a free shirt? :slight_smile:

How many volunteers for FOSS4G and EuroOSCON do we have already and how many more do we need?

Isn't FOSS4G going to be so full of OSGeo and project related folks that we will be turning them away?

I'm sure you'd agree that the best value is tapping into more local volunteers as much as possible. This worked well at Where 2.0 and OSCON - I grabbed a couple people I knew and then relied on referrals from them to get more people who were keen. That helped build a local interest group, helped expand the OSGeo net further and was a win-win for everybody. There were even a couple leftover tickets that we were able to give to some students who were doing some good (local) open source GIS work.

I suggest casting the net as wide as you can - i.e. on discuss list - and then zeroing in on people that you know are going to be there, who live in the area, who could come with a little encouragement or who know others in the area they could recommend.

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.

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.

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.

Hope it helps,
Tyler

----- Original Message -----
From: Arnulf Christl <arnulf.christl@ccgis.de>
Date: Wednesday, August 30, 2006 8:27 am
Subject: [OSGeo-Board] Re: People at FOSS4G

Jo Walsh wrote:
> dear all,
>
> There are a couple of people who I wish I could find some kind of
> financial support for to travel to FOSS4G and EuroOSCON who
would be
> reallu useful to have there and are doing good work for open source
> geospatial and OSGeo. I don't know whether it would be
appropriate for
> the foundation to have a travel grant fund - it might be a bit
> hard to get sponsorship for. I'm thinking something very limited for
> people who really could benefit from the support. Or if this is a
> mechanism we could establish and use soon enough in time for these
> events.
>
> I see in the budget there is a slot for "Promotional
travel"(18KUSD) and
> i think that is what this would constitute. One of the people i
have in
> mind is working a lot on FDO and would be a poster child at
EuroOSCON
> for open source community interexchange with MapGuide. The other is
> a whiz kid working on GeoRSS who had a paper accepted at FOSS4G but
> is in the very rural midwest and it's a big expense. He could
come and
> make lots of interesting mashup stuff, sitting around on the
booth there.
>
> We're in a position to support / release funds for this sort of
thing?
> Or if this is a bit widespread or too soon, can anyone suggest how
> these people *might* find travel support from other organisations?
>
> cheers,
>
>
> jo

Hi,
the response from projects to help staff booths at FOSS4G and
EuroOSCON
has been near void. As Visibility is one of the key missions of
OSGeo I
would very much support tapping into our VisCom budget to get
people
help staff the booth.

Besides that it gives us a good chance to integrate those people
to our
goals individually. I'll be hanging around the booth all the time
anyway. People who had a chance to profit from OSGeo are better
volunteers. As we can see the bulk of work in OSGeo is done by a
few, we
need to get more. Paying people full time is one way to do it,
giving
incentives is easier and does not bind any money we don't have yet.

btw: I have heard lots of "oh why are we only a volunteer
organization"
moans. There is some educating reading regarding the definition
of
volunteer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer which might help
to
understand why volunteers are the best thing that can happen to us
from
a governance and long term visionary perspective. Especially in
highly
automized societies volunteer work is becoming more and more
important... sorry, I am rambling.

I must confess that results from requests for support so far have
been
disappointing (volunteers suck), even switching gender did not
help (or
shied them away :-).

Gary,
if you feel you cannot hit reply immediately, I would like to
bring in a
motion at the next board meeting to use ~2.5k from the travel
budget to
be spent for travel costs for volunteers at the FOSS4G and
EuroOSCON
booths. (is that enough, Jo? Can you get more precise numbers?)

Regards,
Arnulf (aka Seven)

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3

I just mention it so that we don't think there has been money spent
from our primary sponsor to allow for this already.

Meant to say: "...so that we don't think there HAS NOT been money spent..."

4

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
    

5

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.)

Speaking of which, what's the protocol for figuring out where the main conference is next year? Some South Africans have been in touch with me, and they're quite interested in trying to host it next year or the year after, and I've been neglecting telling them how to go about since I just don't know. It seems like it'd be ideal to announce at the end of this conference? Is someone already working on it?

Chris

6

Chris Holmes wrote:

Speaking of which, what's the protocol for figuring out where the main conference is next year? Some South Africans have been in touch with me, and they're quite interested in trying to host it next year or the year after, and I've been neglecting telling them how to go about since I just don't know. It seems like it'd be ideal to announce at the end of this conference? Is someone already working on it?

Chris,

There is an unofficial "Conference Committee" at conference.osgeo.org, mostly
initialized from the existing international steering committee. We are trying
to issue an RFP for this, but have had trouble finding someone willing to lead
the conference committee. A bit stalled on this point actually.

The plan is that we would issue an RFP by no later than FOSS4G, and hopefully
select a site by early November. But of course our plan was to have a
selection done by FOSS4G and that slid.

Best regards,
--
---------------------------------------+--------------------------------------
I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam@pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org

7

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".

I would like to see us have a travel grant fund that people could request support from or apply to and a committee could dole out, but I see this as distinct from the promo budget.

While I would like to see ways to help get members more involved in events, I'm a little concerned about setting precedence on what "people we like" means, without some clear guidelines. Of course, at present, no one is going to want to say they don't like the people you or I like, so then it comes down who asks first or who is 'brave' enough to ask the question :slight_smile: Who is going to say no, since we all have a benevolent nature?

I'm sure that if some of the PSC's or other members knew we had money to help support them, they would have asked to come to promote their projects, which would seem much easier to justify.

I assume VisCom should get a plan together for how the promo budget gets spent, so there is some longer term vision for how the funds are directed. I'm not saying this kind of support wouldn't fall in there, but I'm having trouble seeing the benefit for OSGeo to fund to have someone come when there are already so many supporters going to be there, unless EuroOSCON is in desperate need of OSGeo representation or a certain project is having trouble getting a rep there.

I guess it also touches on the point of whether or not we want OSGeo to be seen as having money to give away for this kind of support in general.

Were you looking for VisCom support on this? I assume the board will decide what to do on this, but I just wanted to bring up a few discussion points. Would love to see Andy there, of course :slight_smile:

Arnulf - Are there some conference passes still available at all?

Tyler