[OSM-talk] suggestion for SOTM09

Daniel Glassey dglassey at gmail.com
Tue Jul 15 13:10:54 BST 2008


2008/7/15 Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org>:
> Hi,
>
>> Gran Canaria. The GNOME and KDE free desktop conferences are jointly
>> being held there Friday, July, 3rd until Saturday, July 11th 2009.
>
>> So I think it would be great if SOTM could be there, say, Sat 11th-Sun
>> 12th.
>
> Nothing against Gran Canaria at all but I don't see a lot of value in doing
> SOTM directly before or after an event that has nothing to do with mapping
> or maps?

fwiw here are my main reasons for suggesting it:

imho the similarity of goals for free and open software and free and
open mapping is major. So it is a good community to make more aware of
openstreetmap though I know quite a lot of folks are involved already.

I would guess it is cheaper to organise something when it is
associated with something else. This conference has a lot of support
from the local government so hopefully they would be willing to help
too.

It is the same time as SOTM has been the first 2 years.

> If you're desperate to tag SOTM onto some other international conference
> than the obvious choice would be FOSS4G (Sydney 2009) but even there I don't
> see added value for us.

FOSS4G might be good to tag along with but only when it is in Europe
so definitely not next year. Being close to another conference has its
pros and cons. Major pro is potential to attract new folks from other
conference, especially programmers to contribute to the software.
Major con is potential to get swamped by folks from other conference.
I 'm not the one to decide whether that is appropriate or not for
SOTM, and I can't make up my mind anyway.

fwiw location-wise I would prefer somewhere more easily and cheaply
accessible by most people that would like to come than I expect GC
would be.

Regards,
Daniel




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