Tenth VisCom Meeting Minutes

This meeting was entirely via IRC (IRC log) on August 17th, 2006, from 15:00 to 16:00 UTC. Present were Michael Gerlek (chair), Tyler (scribe), Arnulf Christl, Lisa Landers, Aaron Racicot.

Agenda was: http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Tenth_VisCom_Meeting

We covered "new" business", and also scrubbed out a lot of the "old" business. Action items are in bold. Minutes are organized by subject, not chronologically.

New Business

• Michael moved to add Venka as member of committee
  • Seconded by Arnful, all were in favour
  • [TODO] add Venka to members list [done -mpg]

• Introduction to Lisa Landers, Autodesk marketing
  • She has time to help with OSGeo, has marketing/event and non-profit background and can help with guidance around event planning
  • [TODO] she will put together a set of documents as a help/guidebook that we can refer to if we want to learn more about event management/marketing, serving as a standard operating procedure for planning events.
  • Lisa is Autodesk coordinator for MapAsia conference
  • Suggested that Viscom to choose/identify which conferences to support for the upcoming year... discuss on mailing list. [put on ToDo list -mpg]

• Event Handling
  • Michael introduces idea of having a specific group for handling event management side of viscom.
  • It's unclear whether we have enough people to fork. The idea is not to fork but to have two specific focuses.
  • The idea is to help focus on some of the non-event tasks better.
  • Discussed to spread the even planning load (especially international)
  • Maintain assigning event owner for each event.
  • We need to keep aiming to have local contact to help lead organisation

• Hawaii Event
  • As brought up by Frank W on mailing list
  • [TODO] mpg to post idea to discuss list and give general invite to folks to participate/take lead. [put on ToDo list -mpg]
  • Frank W. adds that Ben Disco did express interest in attending. Some coordinatation with him would be good.

• Incubation Support
  • Discussing collateral needs for projects that are graduating from incubation
  • Arnulf suggests projects should have a presentation for graduation
  • [TODO] mpg to follow up on inccom grad. needs/ideas

• Prototype web site replace discussion
  • mpg, arnulf are keen to move to the new site
  • Tyler explains that another week is needed before site is moved off a development server

• Events Page and Library
  • [TODO] mpg to fix/clean up events page on wiki and then do parallel process in drupal as a test process [put on ToDo list -mpg]
  • ongoing item...

• Membership Sign-up Process
  • If we can have new web site up by foss4g, members could sign up, etc.
  • Check out: checkout http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Project_Infrastructure_Migration
  • Also http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Drupal_Portal

• Shirts and Business Cards
  • Michael wants to help organise this more
  • Discussed individual members who want shirts, and vips that he owes shirts to, plus all the events that are happening.
  • How many shirts needed for upcoming euro events?
  • Lisa requests 10-20 shirts specifically for map asia
  • [TODO] to start getting invite and ordering process in motion
  • Tyler notes we have a paypal account (now <a href="mailto:paypal@osgeo.org">paypal@osgeo.org</a>)
  • [TODO] Tyler to follow up with funcom on how the paypal account could start to be used more generally
  • [TODO] Michael to review abilities to use landsend for individual orders [done -mpg]

• Booth Upgrade/Budget item
  • Discussed need for buying a booth to be shipped around to events
  • Decided to handle it on an event-to-event basis.

Old Business

• OSCON Feedback...
  • Aaron and Lisa discussed their observations
  • There was good attendance and visibility
  • 20-25 at bof
  • difficult talking while folks trying to hunt for particular brochures..
  • table placement was improved from where 2.0
  • #1 recurring question... "where is postgis in this?" : )
  • awesome booth placement.. only cost $60k to get it (Autodesk sponsorship)
  • conference in general was really inviting, good quality sessions
  • black booth wasn't the best.. hard to catch eye
  • some booth layout could be improved to be even more inviting
  • Need to software demos available for every project
  • Casual talking outside booth was all positive (Lisa observed)
  • [TODO] Lisa to follow up with ZDNet re: intereview at OSCON