LOC conference call Jan 25, 2011

Agenda

Meeting notes in bold

Attendees:

• Peter Batty
• Tyler Erickson
• James Fee
• Jeff McKenna
• Tyler Mitchell
• Henry Rosales
• James Sakamoto
• Ben Tuttle

LOC members and roles

• See FOSS4G 2011 LOC members and assignments for current list

Peter still needs to chase down a few people and confirm if they are in or out of the LOC

Sponsorship Update (Peter Batty / Tyler Mitchell)

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

One new Bronze since last week, camptocamp.

Workshops (Ben Tuttle)

Ben Tuttle (lead), Jeff McKenna, Chris Helm

• The call for proposals is open
• Proposals are being stored in Google Docs for sharing with the committee
• Starting the process to determine the venue capacity

1. How many workshops can we hold?
2. How many people can each workshop hold?
3. Computer Logistics?
4. other?

• Need to prepare for proposal review process in the coming weeks.

There have been four proposals received so far. We anticipate that most submissions will come in just before the deadline. We can do 6 workshops at a time. We will get all software installed on a single machine and create an image that we can give to the computer provider to install on all machines ahead of time. Computers will not have a hard wired network but will be able to access WiFi. We have up to 24 slots for workshops. We agreed that we will do morning and afternoon sessions over the two days (unlike last year).

Academic Track (Rafael Moreno)

Rafael has been making good progress getting people engaged on this on the separate FOSS4G academic list

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.