FOSS4G 2009 Meeting 2008-07-30 (Integrating free & proprietary conferencing software)

Review of OCS Software:

Present:

From South Africa:
 * Gavin Fleming
 * Graeme McFerren

From Tour Hosts:
 * Denisa Adamova
 * Janelle Driscoll
 * Andrew
 * Danniel

From OSGeo Australia:
 * Cameron Shorter
 * Simon Hope sent his appologies

We discussed OCS and Tour Host's Event software.

Key aims are to have continuity of presentations between FOSS4G years.

OCS doesn't support all features required by Tour Hosts, like Finances, Accommodation booking, and a number of others.

The proposed solution is to use OCS for collecting presentations, and some of the registration work flow, then hand the rest over to the ICS software. (I haven't captured all the details here. Will leave that to someone else). Changes will likely be written in PHP & MySQL, plus contractors might need to be hired to provide hooks into the Events system.

A very rough estimate of effort = 1 to 2 person months effort. If we hire an Australian to do all this work, and costs are added to budget, it will add ~ $50 extra per delegate (based on Cameron's very rough back of envelope calculations)

Next steps:

Either:
 * 1) OSGeo Board to commit money to sponsoring OCS integration. This could be factored into the FOSS4G budget and will add ~ $50 / person to the conference.
 * 2) A team of OSGeo volunteers take on the OCS development and reduce the cost per delegate.