OSGeo at OSCON 2006

= General =
 * O'Reilly's Open Source Convention held in Portland, Oregon, USA - July 24-28th, 2006.
 * See http://conferences.oreillynet.com/os2006/


 * Booth and adverts will be provided as at where 2.0 by Autodesk marketing staff (thanks!).
 * Gary is doing a keynote talk.
 * OSGeo has a 45 minute speaking slot as well

To Do

 * Finalise speaking roster, times, content and descriptions
 * Create OSGeo "Overview" brochures, to help tie together all the individual ones and give an overview of the organisation
 * Improve/correct existing brochures from Where 2.0
 * Establish a way of adding new members, to point visitors to (i.e. a PC with a registration page ready)

Attendees
Need passes:
 * Gary Lang (keynote speaker)
 * Mark Lucas (speaker)
 * Aaron Racicot (speaker)
 * Jo Walsh (speaker)
 * 1) Josh Livni
 * 2) Autodesk 1
 * 3) Autodesk 2
 * 4) Anselm Hook
 * 5) David Percy
 * 6) William Garrick
 * 7) Scott Emmons

Exhibit/booth Times

 * Wednesday July 26th
 * Exhibit Room open most of day - 10:00am - 5:00pm
 * Exhibit Hall reception event - 6:00 - 7:30pm


 * Thursday July 27th
 * Exhibit Hall open most of day - 10:00am - 5:00pm

OSGeo Events

 * Gary's keynote talk Thursday, July 27, 9:00 - 9:15am
 * Jo, Mark and Aaron share the OSGeo session Thursday, July 27, 10:45 - 11:30am

= How it went =

Please add pictures if you have them

OSGeo talks

 * Gary's keynote talk - slides?

Gary delivered the same talk he did at Where2.0


 * OSGeo session - 'Mapping and Open Source Geospatial Tools

Jo did a five-minute intro to OSGeo - why there is a software foundation and what projects and users can hope to gain from its existence. talk slides (html + lots of css - works in mozilla but not IE)

Aaron did a more detailed intro to the Open Source Geospatial software stack - related projects like PostGIS and QGIS as well as projects going through the incubator - and talked about the work he's doing at ecotrust.org (slides?)

Mark did a talk on OSSIM and its use in high accuracy, realtime-as-possible raster imagery processing; this got a real "ooh-ahh" reaction from the crowd. (slides?)

OSGeo booth
The booth was right at the front of the exhibit hall - what you get for 'diamond sponsorship'. We had the 10 leaflets that Tyler produced for VisCom at Where2.0 plus the new one-page overview one.

Schwag
Several people asked after the unofficial 'OSGeo hat' that Jo made out of the deconstructed remains of an OSGeo t-shirt. This wound up as a patch sewn on to a regular black hat. Patches are neat, useful for covering up other peoples logos on tshirts, bags etc, and are cheap to produce. They could be a fun piece of schwag as as a giveaway or for members.

Explanatory material
By early afternoon on the first day of the booth we'd already run out of MapGuide and Mapserver leaflets and the overview leaflets and had to print more. We made some 'composite brochures' of all the individual project / committee one-pagers stapled together with a shiny black cover. These went almost as fast as they could be made - a lot of people spent time carefully fishing a copy of all the different one-pagers out of the rack of leaflets. It could be good to have a stack of these made up ahead of time for a future stall.

Books
We borrowed from the publishers' stalls a copy each of "Web Mapping Illustrated", "Mapping Hacks" (both O'Reilly), and "Beginning Mapserver" (Apress). It was good to have them not just for cross-promotion (remember that at Where2.0 quite a lot of people seemed to be asking "what books do you recommend where i can learn more about get myself into the tools") and also for legitimacy reasons - "look our software is bona fide and solid enough for people to write and publish books about it".

In future it would be good to have copies of books that we can bring rather than borrrow from bemused publishing people. (The Apress person was lovely and let us keep the book afterwards). It would be good to have other books that cover open source GIS / osgeo tools - particularly Markus' GRASS book and the rewrite of it that's being planned - we should make an osgeo collaborative book - Free GIS Book probably being a good place to start.

Space Layout
Lisa pointed out the Yahoo! booth which was much more 'welcoming' ... open space with demo stations at the back - a little round table at the front to cluster around and not leave the space wide open - rather than what we had which was a row of tables we were sitting behind - nice for us but less welcoming for people passing by who might want to come in and look at demos, have deeper conversations etc.