[Talk-us] SOTM-US compared

[Alex Barth]

Frederik -

Thank you for taking the time to write up your impressions (and for coming
out to San Francisco in the first place) - this is really helpful for
creating better conferences.

> tea, chocolate and delicate mini cakes during practially all the breaks ;)

You can't beat that :)

On the note of conferences - everyone check out State of the Map in
Birmingham, I am looking forward to being there.

http://2013.stateofthemap.org/

I also know there are still sponsorship opportunities, so get your
employers to support a great OpenStreetMap conference!



On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 4:35 PM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> 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"
>
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