dear Howard, thanks for your email which has been along with its responses very thought-provoking,
On Tue, Aug 28, 2007 at 10:18:36PM -0700, Dave Patton wrote: > Howard Butler wrote: > >Most of OSGeo's measurable successes to date have been volunteer > >efforts, not primarily financially-backed ones. The OSGeo Journal > >effort, Google Summer of Code administration, the Geodata committee's > >efforts, and even much of our system administration to keep the lights > >on for developer tools Well, these are quite different kinds of efforts. The Journal has come together because of Tyler's time invested in it, so it is more or less direct financial backing from OSGeo. The SoC programme, look forward to hear more about the eventual experiences of, but that came about in the first place because of direct Google financial support to students. The Geodata committee's efforts have been more like what you describe about software projects coming together - a byproduct of a set of interconnected people each scratching their own itches. But being more loose collaboration than planned action it is a bit impenetrable to those outside the immediate loop, i think. And geodata and systems administration have overlapped quite a bit, as people get shanghaied into helping with different problems ;) But keeping the lights on, and creating new things, are quite different. One burns out on doing administrative / organising things and i wish there were a way that could be automated and/or shared. The structure we have now with one "Committee Chair" per committee, one gets into overcommitment/guilt and superfluous soul-searching. > >benefactor as we do now. We're almost two years down the road into > >bootstrapping, and our majority benefactor situation has budged very > >little. As far as I know, our only significant incoming sponsorship > >dollars beyond Autodesk are the "targeted development" vehicles like > >those that pay for a permanent maintainer for GDAL. This definitely seems something the Board should be talking about, the whole question of what sponsors are visibly getting and what can be done to get them involved, and at what should we aim. I have added a few notes to the Agenda section for the next meeting right before FOSS4G and i would urge anyone to add their concerns so it can be refined - re-framed? - nearer the time... http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Board_Meeting_FOSS4G2007#Agenda > There has certainly been a lot of volunteer effort by the organizers > of the FOSS4G 2007 conference It is terrific to see so much effort and I am really looking forward to getting to see it realised, taking lots of pictures, sending press releases etc. At the same time i am having to beg and borrow to get to Victoria and I know many, many others from outside North America for whom the combination of long flight and cost of living disparity is just too large a barrier. Something else i would like to add to the Board's discussion is the possibility of funding either travel expenses or better, several smaller conferences distributed around the planet, next year... cheers, jo -- _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
