LOC conference call Feb 1, 2011

Agenda

Meeting notes in bold

Attendees:

• Jeff McKenna
• Tyler Mitchell
• Ben Tuttle
• Rafael Moreno
• Henry Rosales
• James Sakamoto
   

LOC members and roles

• See FOSS4G 2011 LOC members and assignments for current list

No update 

Sponsorship Update (Peter Batty / Tyler Mitchell)

• Review of sponsor prospect list and status of those that are likely / confirmed

Three new sponsors since last meeting.  1 Silver and 2 Bronze.  Total revenue is now at $82,350 (includes early bird 10% discounts)

Workshops (Ben Tuttle)

Ben Tuttle (lead), Jeff McKenna, Chris Helm

• The call for proposals is closing today 
• Proposals are being stored in Google Docs for sharing with the committee
  

Quite a few last minute submissions.  Review process to begin this week.  Tyler to close link on website / James to close form once two re-submissions are received.  Henry checking into the cost of revised specs for laptop rentals.  Propose registration for workshop/tutorials - Workshops - one comp/one 50% discount.  Tutorials - 50% discount off of one registration.  Ben brought up the need for volunteers.  Need to make sure volunteers are multi-day - not just one workshop and a comp for the remainder of the conference.  Henry to discuss volunteer program with Pete.

Academic Track (Rafael Moreno)

Draft of announcement nearly complete.  Journals for publication have been selected.  Includde Academic Track as part of the general session abstract submission form.  Include additional check boxes for academic sessions and posters.  Also include note that there is a 400 word limit for academic submissions.

Program (James Fee)

James Fee (lead), Brian Timoney (newcomer focus), Matt Krusemark (open data focus), Tyler Erickson (govt focus)

• FOSS4G 2011 Call for Presentations
• Upcoming items: issue call for papers, Feb 1. Will need suitable verbiage on our focus areas as well as web forms etc. Also do we want to ask for submissions for multiple formats, e.g. 5 minute presentations in addition to longer format ones? Panels? One idea from a recent UK conference I attended is to have 5 minute "georants" on more informal / fun / contentious topics in a bar one evening.
• Answer the following question from Adrian Custer on the mailing list:

Some questions below about whether you have settled on an explicit focus for your conference. It seems your choices during your organization work will invariably influence the nature of this conference as mainly either a gathering of free software hackers for fun and cooperation or as a platform for those of us vending our software projects. I wonder how much thinking and conscious decision making you have made on this issue. (My high level answer: we aim to address needs of both groups)

Will there be any limits on talks from the same organization, from the same vendor, or from members of the organizing and selection committees? In particular, how does this work in that sponsors at the $most_precious_metal sponsorship level are already guaranteed one slot? (My suggestion, let's dioscuss: not hard pre-defined limits but we will review number of papers accepted per company before finalizing the program and may make adjustments if we feel it is appropriate).

Does anyone know what the policy has been (if any) in previous years? Also, are talk proposals once again going to be submitted to a popularity vote? In my analysis, that resulted in getting many talks from the well known projects and well known personalities rather than getting a wide distribution of talks favouring the, possibly whacky, smaller projects. All are interesting, of course, but lead to a different flavour for the gathering so I am wondering what you are hoping to produce. (Yes we plan to do a vote but intend for the final program to be a mix of papers selected by the vote and papers selected by the organizing committee).

• Keynote speakers ... are we planning to get any "external" keynote speakers (people outside those we would expect to submit abstracts)? If so need to start on getting those identified and signed up now. Examples might include well known figures from the broader open source world, maybe some to address the "open data" theme. Steve Coast would be one candidate there. I might be able to get John Hickenlooper, the Colorado Governor, to do a short welcome address - he is a good speaker and has some geo background. On the open data theme, Tim Berners Lee might be a good if ambitious choice to pursue ... he has been widely credited with pressuring get the UK government to open up its data, including geospatial data. He's known to be a fan of OpenStreetMap too.

Some discussion about topics, which James commented hadn't changed in the past few years. We agreed it was okay to mix these up a bit. We need to add open data as a topic, and explain a bit more about what we're looking for there.

Registration / Pricing (Tyler Mitchell)

• Does proposed 2011 pricing need adjustment? Current proposal is $499 for early and $649 for late.
• Need to establish policies for any discounted registration categories (students??), policy for comp registrations, etc (not today but reasonably soon)

Peter, Tyler and Henry will follow up on that.

Social Events (Peter / other volunteers?)

Peter has made initial contact with the Wynkoop Brewing Company, Henry has requested information from several venues for the gala dinner.

Marketing (Matt Ball)

Matt is in India this week but has begun work on various topics, including media sponsorship, how we do press releases, etc

Website (Who owns ??)

• Currently hosted on squarespace - seems fine so far for basic content, reasonable control over design etc. Only $20 a month including hosting and all editing tools
• Need to look soon at requirements for doing a nice job of an online conference program, need to evaluate whether squarespace is up to this

Peter and Tyler still looking for someone to pick this up. Tyler has asked a marketing company he has worked with previously to provide a quote for marketing / identity items (posters, flyers, etc).

SotM coordination

No major news this week.