LOC conference call Jan 12, 2011

Agenda

Review of LOC members and roles

• Summary of responsibilities / expectations

Sponsorship Update (Peter Batty / Tyler Mitchell)

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

Workshops (Ben Tuttle)

Ben Tuttle (lead), Jeff McKenna, Chris Helm

• Upcoming deadline: issue call for workshops, Jan 15
• Anything we need to do differently from "typical" year? We are planning I think on a "newbie" event in parallel with the technical workshops. Do we need to ask for proposals to contribute to that, or will we just solicit people? May be worth getting proposals for sessions in that event versus whole "workshop" proposal ... in which case do we just do that as part of the main call for papers? Brian Timoney to lead discussion on this.
• Jeff/Ben to give short summary of anything the group should know about the overall typical process here / update on progress

Program (James Fee)

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

• 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.
• In near term will need to determine how the community review and voting process will work (find out what happened in past). Need to get web site in place to handle this, and work out what the process will be for selecting the papers - what proportion determined by the vote versus the LOC, any guidelines on how / when we override the vote, etc.
• 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 discuss: 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.

Registration / Pricing (Tyler Mitchell)

• Does proposed 2011 pricing need adjustment? Current budget proposal is $*** for early and $*** for late.
• Is the timing shown on the timeline right ... really should have at least the provisional program available a little way ahead of early registration deadline
• Need to establish policies for any discounted registration categories (students??), policy for comp registrations, etc (not today but reasonably soon)

Social Events (Peter / other volunteers?)

Proposed main social events are as follows (get agreement on this today, need to confirm venues asap):

• Sunday night - potential informal meetup combined with State of the Map (may just be "meet at this pub"?)
• Tuesday night – informal welcome event, open to all attendees. Likely venue Wynkoop Brewing Company. Potential for pool tournament / challenge the pro games with "Melissa the Viper" :)
• Wednesday night – reception at Sheraton on and around exhibit floor. Need to work out logistics as number of attendees much larger than will fit in exhibit space.
• Thursday – “Signature Event”, priced separately. Probably at cool venue like the Art Museum or similar. Propose stand-up versus seated event, lower cost and better for networking. Initial budget had this priced at $99, seems high to me (though not out of line with previous years). Suggest $75 target?

Marketing (Matt Ball)

• Matt to work with GITA on marketing plan
• Current assumption is no printed material except for on site program - everyone ok with that?
• Will have plenty of informal marketing via OSGeo mailing lists, blogs and twitter of LOC members, etc
• One option for graphical design is that we can contract further work with the person who produced the winning logo

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 program, need to evaluate whether squarespace is up to this