[Talk-us] SOTM-US compared

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

    this year I was at SOTM-US for the first time, and immediately 
thereafter travelled to the German-language version of FOSS4G, the 
FOSSGIS conference. There were lots of similarities - but also big 
contrasts. Below is a personal comparison that might or might not be 
useful or interesting.

Both conferences were about the same size. I think FOSSGIS had a few 
more talks but SOTM-US had a few more visitors. Alas, FOSSGIS has three 
tracks of which traditionally one is exclusively OSM and the others are 
about other open source GIS stuff that might touch OSM but not 
necessarily so - so the number of pure OSM talks was probably higher at 
SOTM-US.

SOTM-US was held in San Francisco, the (Wikipedia) "leading financial 
and cultural centre of Northern California" with about 800k inhabitants, 
and FOSSGIS was held in Rapperswil, a town of 8,000 half an hour away 
from Zurich, in Switzerland. Which might explain why at FOSSGIS we were 
greeted by the mayor and the president of the university, who said that 
because his university is on the shore of Lake Zurich, during the summer 
months he occasionally feels like he's running a swimming pool and not a 
university.

Surprisingly, public transport was excellent in both locations; getting 
to the conference location from the airport was unproblematic.

Both conferences covered their expenses through sponsorship, ticket 
sales, and paid-for workshops. Both offered sponsors the option of 
setting up a little booth. FOSSGIS has been doing that for a long time; 
for SOTM-US I don't if this was new. At FOSSGIS, as a community member, 
my entry was free but I was charged EUR 60 for the food and drink flat 
rate at the social event (pre-dinner beers and dinner at a farm house in 
walking distance); at SOTM-US, even speakers had to pay the US$75 ticket 
price but the social events were essentially parties thrown by different 
companies and as such, free of charge. The social event at FOSSGIS 
offered fantastic views over Lake Zurich and the mountains beyond; the 
social events at SOTM-US allowed one to catch a glimpse of what working 
for Stamen or Code for America is like. (Both offices were very cool in 
their own way. Although I doubt there's free beer during business 
hours.) On a third night, MapBox treated us to drinks at a local bar.

Sponsors were very unobtrusive at both conferences. I knew it was like 
that at FOSSGIS but I was positively surprised by SOTM-US which, being 
held in the Land of the Free and of Unfettered Market Capitalism, I had 
feared might confront myself with much more sponsor messages than my 
European soul could take. In the end it was not a problem at all (big 
thank you to the sponsors at this point).

Both conferences were held at universities, however SOTM-US was at a 
proper conference centre, whereas for FOSSGIS we used the normal student 
auditoriums. This has a certain tradition with FOSSGIS which is in many 
respects a low-budget event and doesn't spend a lot of money on being 
classy - if it is good enough for students then it is good enough for 
FOSSGIS. Video recording was through volunteers at FOSSGIS, and through 
paid professionals at SOTM-US; the FOSSGIS volunteers did an excellent 
job but of course student auditoriums are not as well prepared for 
recording as a conference centre.

This year, for the first time since I can remember, FOSSGIS got the name 
badges right - large font, on lanyards, dual sided. It used to be a 
running gag with FOSSGIS about what would go wrong this time - either 
the font is too small, or only one side is printed and it flips over all 
the time, or whatnot. The name badges at SOTM-US were unremarkably 
professional - you didn't even notice that everything was right about 
them. (Good designers can probably tell a tale of this - if you do 
things just right, nobody will notice.)

One small thing that struck me as extremely useful at SOTM-US was the 
programme booklet. Spring-bound, so you could easily have it flipped to 
the right page for the current day and small enough to fit in your 
pocket - the ideal utility for the conference nomad! FOSSGIS usually has 
a couple sheets of copied paper which are no match to a neat booklet. 
Definitely worth imitating. (FOSSGIS, to its defense, has a free, 
full-size, 140-page bound volume of conference proceedings where 
basically every speaker presents their topic on a couple written pages - 
which is certainly quite useful to many, but while you're there, the 
schedule booklet beats that easily.)

On the whole, FOSSGIS (even though the conference itself has been around 
longer than OSM and much longer than any SOTM conference) still has a 
bit of an amateur flair to it, but in a way I think that's intentional. 
There may be many professionals there, but it isn't a professionally-run 
conference, and I find that charming. SOTM-US is of course not a 
professionaly-run conference either but it appears a little more like one.

FOSSGIS is not a pure OSM event, and has many Open Source GIS types from 
business and administration, but even so, I had the impression that the 
number of OSM people whose interest in OSM is purely that of a hobbyist 
or who are in it as mappers was higher at FOSSGIS than at SOTM-US; the 
latter seemed to have a larger number of people from a professional 
background, who often seemed to be there to learn about OSM and not 
because they were already doing/using it. But that is just a superficial 
impression; I only spoke to a fraction of people present.

Because FOSSGIS has this Open Source focus, we do only in exceptional 
cases allow presentations of non-open software there; whereas SOTM-US 
had some makers of proprietary software tell us what they do with OSM. 
I'm a bit on the fence about this; on the one hand, it is interesting to 
hear what people do with OSM, and it strengthens the project if people 
use it, but on the other hand if you come out of a talk where somebody 
told you how they employ cool OSM tricks in their product but it is 
proprietary software then there's nothing of this "cool, I'll have to 
play with that" feeling that you often have in Open Source talks.

On the other hand, the two-day hack event that followed immediately 
after SOTM-US (I only participated on day 1) seemed like an excellent 
idea and that's not something we've ever had at FOSSGIS.

The biggest contrast between the two conferences was of course, as I 
said initially, the surroundings; from (near) Silicon Valley to (near) 
the Swiss Alps - walking through bustling San Francsisco streets to 
catch the BART, and shortly thereafter finding yourself on a quiet 
commuter train along the shore of Lake Zurich heading for another 
conference, is almost unreal for someone whose life normally is 
somewhere between these extremes. But in a way, the setting of either 
conference did match the spirit. At SOTM-US I heard many people speak of 
short time frames, of things that need to (or will) happen in the next 
couple of months, of change, of OSM being on the doorstep of this or 
other, of business models quickly and radically changing, and so on. At 
FOSSGIS, in contrast, things seemed much more slowly paced, and people 
were talking about changes that would happen "maybe 2014" - which one 
you prefer is certainly a matter of taste. SOTM-US had more energy; 
FOSSGIS felt altogether more relaxed.

Also, true to established stereotypes, our Swiss hosts served coffee, 
tea, chocolate and delicate mini cakes during practially all the breaks ;)

Thank you to all those who helped organise and run SOTM-US!

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"