North America Regional

For a clear definition of the term North America please refer to the Talk page.

Mission
The primary focus of the North America Regional Chapter will be to organize and run annual North American conferences. It is not the intent of this chapter to duplicate or compete with established local chapters or the international organization's ongoing efforts.

The North America regional conference will also support and collaborate with other like minded organizations for smaller technical and business focused conferences within the region.

Background The OSGeo Board of Directors has recently discussed establishing regional focus groups and conferences that could more effectively address the needs of those areas. This would allow OSGeo to act as more of an umbrella international organization. It is anticipated that the International OSGeo conference will rotate around the globe and will be combined with the regional conference when that region is selected.

Objectives


 * Organize and run an annual North American regional conference
 * Increased focus on open source business models
 * Provide an interface for National, Regional and Local government agencies as they adopt open source solutions
 * Coordinate with local North American chapters for planned events within those localities
 * Support OSGeo board for international events
 * Support a broad range of interest areas:
 * academic
 * social
 * environmental
 * humanitarian relief
 * government
 * OSS business models

What the North American Regional isn't about


 * Duplicating existing efforts at the OSGeo International level or at the local chapter level
 * Running development projects or support infrastructure
 * Local meetups
 * Managing or overseeing other groups

In addition we will be coordinating closely with other relevant organizations:


 * MIL-OSS Military Open Source Software
 * USGIF United States Geospatial Intelligence Agency
 * OSSI Open Source Software Institute
 * OSFA Open Source for America
 * GITA Geospatial Information & Technology Association
 * URISA Association for GIS professionals

Official representative

Mark Lucas Principal Scientist RadiantBlue Technologies Inc.

If the majority of chapter members wish, the post of official representative will be elected on a periodic basis.

Organization
Initial discussion is to organize as a 501c non profit organization.

We suspect it's not necessary to commit to it at this time.

Mailing List
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/northamerica

Meetings and Events
No meetings have been planned yet, the intent will be to establish formal quarterly meetings to review conference and organizational planning.

Upcoming Events
''' FOSS4G 2012 - Beijing

North American Regional OSGeo/foss4g Conference Initial discussion will be focused on organizing a follow on North American regional conference in 2012. We will work to deconflict this event with the OSGeo/foss4g international conference in Beijing as well as the as the annual Geoint conference.

USGIF Technology Day USGIF Technology Day

Wherecon - Washington DC

Towson University Geographic Information Sciences Conference 2012 Wednesday, March 23 and Thursday, March 24, 2011 at the University Union on the Towson University campus

Recent Events
 MIL-OSS WG3  MIL-OSS Working Group 3

 FOSS4G 2011  OSGeo's FOSS4G Denver

 Geoint 2011  Geoint 2011 in San Antonio Tx

 USGIF Tech Days  Washington DC

People
Sign up here to show interest! Also join the mailing list so we can be in touch directly.


 * Mark Lucas
 * Frank Warmerdam
 * Tyler Mitchell
 * Dave McIlhagga
 * David Bitner
 * Andrew Ross
 * Michael Smith
 * Ned Horning
 * Robert Hollingsworth
 * J. Batista (PB)
 * Michael P. Gerlek (mpg)
 * Lisa Sweeney