Face To Face Action Items

Action Items From the Face to Face Meeting

Budget Discussion - Need $285,000 to $520,000

We discussed two sets of budget items. One was the idea of an "Executive Director" who would represent OSGeo on a full-time basis to make sure we are fulfilling the OSGeo mission and priorities.

The priorities have been discussed on the board list. For focus, we limited our discussion to the top five priorities, because we felt that they:

• had the most impact on fulfilling our mission
• included the greatest number of operational expenses that would be required

In summary, we will need to raise between $275,000 and $520,000 to be effective in carrying out the priorities as expressed by the OSGeo community since its inception four months ago in Chicago.

We broke the discussion into two discussions about:

1. The hiring of an executive director.
2. The budget required to implement the top five priorities we've identified.

Executive Director - $135,000 to $170,000

Responsibilities

• Evangelism
• MarComm
  • Internal and External
  • Outward bound communication
  • Community Management
  • Fundraising
  • Conference management

Qualifications

• Excellent Communications Skills
• Needs to be conversant with developer and user community concerns
• Needs to understand open source
• Must be willing to travel world-wide
• Fully burdened cost $135-170K
• Salary – negotiable ($90-120K)
• Fringe (Medical, Insurance, DSL, etc.) $15-20K
• Travel & Expenses - $30K

OSGeo Priority Fulfillment Expenses - $150,000 to $350,000

• Promote the use of open source software in the geospatial industry (not just foundation software)- $133,000
• To provide resources for foundation projects - infrastructure, funding (Fundraising), legal, ... - $60,000
• To operate an annual OSGeo Conference, possibly in cooperation with related efforts (e.g. EOGEO) - $100,000
• To make foundation and related software more accessible to end users - binary "stack" builds, cross package documentation, etc. - $50,000

Local Chapters

We discussed several case examples of local OSGeo chapters or interest groups. There were clearly a few different levels of responsibility toward OSGeo. The idea of having a progressive level of responsibility was most appealing. A group could start fairly informally as a "Local Interest Group" with some web space and mailing list support and, if warranted, move up to a more formal "OSGeo Chapter" with their own officers. There was consensus to have any OSGeo-branded entity maintain ties back to the current OSGeo organisation - i.e. ultimately reporting to the board. There was some concern about local chapters starting without any discussion with the board or current OSGeo members, yet using the name and sounding official.

• Board members to review and edit the Local Chapter Guidelines page
• Board to approve final set of guidelines at next meeting
• Communication to broader community required

Membership

We debated various semantic issues around naming of groups and types of members associated with OSGeo. We also talked about whether or not the board needed to be (re-)elected again in September, etc.

Proposed Membership Rules was partially revised at the meeting and summarises this bit of the discussion.

Membership Categories

Currently there is only one formal type of membership in OSGeo: "member". They can vote in the board and are part of the limited set of 45 people. We need to consider how to open up membership to a broader group who can call themselves "member". Previous discussion suggested having "Voting Members" and "Non-Voting Members". We debated about how the term "member" becomes meaningless in that context.

A lot of the discussion about membership "classes" was about semantics; the old "Voting Member / Associate Member" chestnut, and not wanting in any way for the semantics to de-emphasise the role of non-voting members of OSGeo. "Participant" (anyone who edits a wiki page / participates in a project) "Member" (some level of self-identification) and "Charter Member" (the original voting 45) were what came out of thrashing over the semantics for half an hour.

One thing a Member should be providing is postal address (implicitly, location for a member map); we have no way of catching this data on the current platform; this data can easily live in LDAP.

• Michael is to draft document for discussion based on Proposed Membership Rules
• After discussion, board to review and adopt membership guidelines

Board Re-election

There has been an assumption that the current board was considered interim and needed to be re-elected or ratified again in September. There was consensus that any changes so soon would disrupt any progress we are making and that the interim concept applied to the initial 5 member board elected in February. Proposing that the board term be set for 1 year, with elections happening next year and not at the FOSS4G event.

• Board to request input from membership for mandate to continue through to a full year

Infrastructure

• Consider merging system admin. committee (SAC) and Web Committee (WebCom) to take maximise the use of volunteers and help build more momentum
• General concern with movement of SAC so far, Frank to get more info. on status of infrastructure development.
• WebCom needs new chair, Frank to pursue

Outreach Planning

OSGeo Presence at FOSS4G

• Need to start planning for booth, talks, etc.

OSGeo Annual Conference

• Starting 2007
• Establish conference planning committee
• Aim for announcement of venue and planning team at FOSS4G