LOC conference call Jan 19, 2011

Agenda

Attendees:

LOC members and roles

• See FOSS4G 2011 LOC members and assignments for current list

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

Academic Track (Rafael Moreno)

• Rafael has emailed Thierry Badard who organized this last year (at the suggestion of Eric), and just heard back from him the other day.

There were various suggestions for others we might get in touch with also - Jeff said he would connect Peter with Venka. Eric and Tyler E were also people who might have input. One specific concern that has been expressed by several people is that it is very important for academics to get papers published, and this is something that FOSS4G hasn't always done well on in the past.

Program (James Fee)

James Fee (lead), Brian Timoney (newcomer 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.
• 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.

There was general agreement that we should include a request for 5 minute presentations in the call for papers. While there are still lingering concerns over people gaming the system, we agreed we would use the community voting system run by Paul as in previous years, and we will use the committee's discretion to decide what proportion of papers come from the voting process and what proportion are selected by the committee. We do not plan to set hard guidelines in advance.

Peter will draft a response to Adrian's email and submit this to the group.

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)

Peter, Tyler and Henry will follow up on that.

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

Future Meetings

• Discussion about using a broader mailing list for our discussions (not foss4g 2011 private)