FOSS4G 2009 Marketing Plan

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Summary

Tuesday 17 - Saturday 21 November 2009

Sydney, Australia

FOSS4G, the annual conference attracting the best of Geospatial Open Source users and developers, will meet in Sydney, Australia in 2009. The conference theme, User Driven, will extend the gathering of the tribes vibe to embrace users and users' case studies.

Specific conference aims:

• To encourage the adoption of Open Source Geospatial Software.
  • To facilitate the meeting of the Open Source Geospatial tribes and sharing of information.
  • To provide a forum for Open Source Geospatial projects to showcase their products to potential users.
  • To allow Geospatial users to be educated in the latest Open Source Geospatial technologies, and practices.

This marketing document identifies key people likely to attend the FOSS4G conference, how to reach them, and what their motivations are for coming. Resulting from this analysis we should tweak our program to ensure it is attractive for our delegates, and focus our marketing efforts to ensure we reach interested delegates.

To brush up on the basics of a Marketing Plan, I suggest skimming over Quick MBA Marketing Plan.

Delegate Demographics

This section aims to profile different types of delegates. It should include:

• Description
• Expected percentage of delegates
• What they want
• How to reach them
• Price sensitivity and spending criteria

OSGeo Developers (tribes)

To date, OSGeo has been heralded as the "international gathering of the tribes", each tribe representing a different Open Source project.

These hard core software developers come from around the world.

Contact: Various OSGeo email lists, in particular (discuss A T lists.osgeo.org).

Geospatial sections of Government departments in Australia

Australian Geospatial conferences like the Spatial Sciences Institute bi-annual conference draw ~ 800 delegates mainly from Government, Mining and the Utilities sectors. Government sectors have already shown an interest in Geospatial Open Source, and this conference in particular.

Contact: Bruce Bannerman.

Geospatial sections of Government departments in New Zealand

Ditto.

Contact: Liz Kolster (?)

Australia/New Zealand Open Source Community

The annual Australian [Linux conference] attracts ~ 800 people.

The annual [Open Source Developers Conference] attracts ~ 350 people.

These local Open Source developers will likely be interested to learn how they can deploy Geospatial Open Source. They would probably be interested in a general overview of topics, and specific lab sessions where they can get their hands dirty.

Key contact point: Jeff Waugh and Pia Waugh, who will be able to forward onto various email lists, like the Open Source Industry Australia (OSIA) and various Linux Users Groups.

The NZ Open Source Society promotes the use of OSS in New Zealand, and has good contacts into government, business, and the various developer/user communities. Key contact point: Don Christie

Education

There has been reasonable interest from Universities and TAFE colleges at Australian geospatial conferences, although it is unclear yet whether there is enough interest to draw delegates to the conference.

Cooperative Research Centre - Spatial Information which is a consortium of a number of universities, government departments and private companies: [1]

Others

If you know people in any of these area then split that area out into another section

Folks in environmental, horticulture, zoology, anthropology, archaelogy, geology, geophysics, engineering, demographics, land management, forestry, aquaculture, meteorology, museums

2007 Sponsors

As identified by Paul Ramsey:

SPONSORS Fee in US Fee in CAD

• Autodesk Inc. - Platinum 25,000.00 28,451.12
• DM Solutions Group - Gold 10,000.00 11,603.75
• ESRI Sponsorship - Silver 5,000.00 5,688.00
• GeoConnections 15,000.00 14,910.00 (local)
• Google Sponsorship - Gold 10,000.00 11,364.62
• ILMB (Integrated Land Management Bureau) 10,000.00 11,608.75 (local)
• Leica Geosystems - Gold 10,000.00 11,251.74
• Orkney, Inc. - Silver 5,000.00 5,191.91
• Refractions Research - Gold 10,000.00 11,603.75
• Safe Software Inc.- Gold 10,000.00 11,603.00
• Sierra Systems Group Inc. 5,000.00 5,300.81 (local)
• Total Sponsorship Payment Received 115,000.00 128,577.45

EXHIBITORS Fee in US Fee in CAD

• CamptoCamp - Stephanie Debayle 2,500.00 2,660.37
• Natural Resources Canada - Brian Low 1,250.00 1,452.00 (local)
• Open Planning Project - Chris Holmes 1,250.00 1,303.37
• Timberline Natural Resource Group - Will Cadell 2,500.00 2,664.01 (local)

Total Exhibitor Payments Received 8,079.75

Please note that this is *NOT* a useful list for solicitation purposes, over half of the entries are organizations with little interest in sponsoring an event on the other side of the world. A (local) tag is next to organisations unlikely to sponsor.

Market Segmentation - Sponsors

IT Companies

Large

• Autodesk
• Google
• Microsoft
• IBM
• Yahoo
• HP
• Nokia
• Sun Microsystems

Media partners

Magazines

GPS World (user:sab made initial contact with Don Jewell, GPS World's Military & Government Editor. They are interested in sending some delegates to cover the event)

Position Magazine have offered free advertising in return for free tickets to FOSS4G. Contact: Wendy Chapman and Jon Fairall.

Geoconnexions Magazine also have set up a media partner relationship with FOSS4G. Free advertising in return for distributing magazines and noting Geoconnexions.

Related Conferences

• 17-19 July 2008, Surfers Paradise [SSI Qld] ~ 300 people from Qld Geospatial industry.
• 1-3 Sep 2008, Auckland GeoCart'2008 Cartography Conference biannual, attracts ~ 200 people from geospatial education/research and industry.
• 29 Sep - 3 Oct 2008, Cape Town, South Africa [FOSS4G 2008]
• November 2, 2008, FOSS4G 2008 Tokyo (Tokyo FOSUFOJI 2008)
• November 7-8, 2008, FOSS4G 2008 Osaka (Osaka FOSUFOJI 2008)
• Nov 2008, Canberra: Geospatial in Government conference being considered. See Ben Searle.
• 02-05 Dec 2008, Sydney, Australia: [Open Source Developers Conference] attracts ~ 350 people. General Open Source. LISAsoft will be giving a presentation on Geospatial Open Source and can plug FOSS4G.
• 19-20 Jan 2009, Hobart, Australia: [Linux conference] attracts ~ 800 people. General Open Source.
• 17.-19 March 2009, Hannover, Germany: [German Language Open Source Geospatial Conference]
• 15 - 15 June 2009, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, [GSDI 11 World Conference] ~ 600 people from 40 countries. Global Spatial Data Infrastructure.
• 15 - 16 June 2009, Canberra, Australia, [spatial@gov Conference]. Probably attract 50 to 150 people from Australian Spatial Government sector.
• 22 June, Nottingham, United Kingdom, [Open Source GIS Conference].
• 8-10 July, 2009, Ecole Centrales De Nates, France, [Open Source Research Symposium]
• 22 - 24 Sept 2009, Karlsruhe, Germany, [Intergeo]. Europe's largest event for geoinformation and land management.
• 28 Sep - 2 Oct 2009 Adelaide: [Spatial Sciences Institute Bi-annual] attracts ~ 900 people from Government, mining, utilities from Australia and around the region.
• 20 - 23 October 2009 Sydney: FOSS4G
• 26-30 Oct 2009, Bangkok, Thailand, [United Nations Regional Cartographical Conference for the Asia and the Pacific]. Opportunity for international participants to pass through both conferences.
• 26-29 Oct 2009, Kampala, Uganda. FOSS4G track at AfricaGIS 2009. Largest GIS conference series in Africa.
• 4 - 6 November 2009 Perth: [WALIS] attracts ~ 500 people from Government, mining, utilities mainly from West Australia.
• 23 November - 8 December 2009 Sydney (UNSW) : [Geocomputation conference] at UNSW, Sydney. International attendees like to have a back-to-back conference so they can justify coming to both.
• 1 - 5 December 2008: [Autodesk University] Autodesk are a key sponsor, and their employees won't be able to make other conferences during this time.

Email List

A password protected list of community leaders and their email addresses can be found here: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pu9014gybzrd1M6FqyOzGWg&hl=en

Contact Cameron Shorter or Tyler Mitchel if you feel you have a need to see this list.

Viral Marketing through community leaders is an effective way to reach and influence a much greater number of potential delegates.

Web Marketing

Placing banner adds on some of the high-traffic open source project sites is a huge source of referrals. This section will keep track of who we have contacted and who has agreed to place banner adds on their sites.

The following sites have committed to doing banner placement:

Industry Event Calendars

We have been adding ourselves to industry event calendars wherever possible. So far, we are on:

• http://www.conferencealerts.com/gis.htm

Private Data

Specific private data about costs are initially being stored on private wiki pages at [[2]]. This data is available to the FOSS4G2009 committee and Tour Hosts, our Professional Conference Organisor.

If you have a need to access this information, contact Cameron DOT Shorter AT Lisasoft DOT com, (who will forward onto helpdesk AT a2end.com).