[OSM-talk] SotM11 will be held in Denver.

Julio Costa Zambelli julio.costa at openstreetmap.cl
Fri Oct 22 21:35:27 BST 2010


Henk,

I do not want to argue since this just a personal opinion from someone
that has gone just to one SOTM and only thanks to the OSI Scholarship,
but:

What was the election criteria? I guess easy access by public
transport, low-budget airlines, and visas for the OSI+OSMF Scholarship
beneficiaries are not in the list. Even though one of the reasons to
choose Girona over Genova for this years SOTM was that it has a
Low-Budget Airline hub in its airport.

I know about JetBlue, but we are talking about the _global_ State Of
The Map, and not about SOTM US. I know the cost of getting to Europe
for many of us is huge, but the truth is that most of the people that
goes to the event is from Western Europe, and that it is not because
the event is done near them, but because those are the countries with
the biggest and most active communities (again some may argue that
they have those big and active communities because events like this
one are made near them). So we can not expect to have the event near
us at the cost of most of the people interested in participate paying
more to get to it or just no going to it.

Can we expect the Department of Homeland Security to be any less
"obstructive" with the scholarship beneficiaries than the agencies in
Europe? I do not want to make an stereotype of the officers of this
agency, since they have treated me so well every time I have gone to
the states, but to be honest if the Spaniards denied 7 visas, I will
bet money that this guys will deny the same or more.

I agree in the fact that the US market/community needs to be
developed/encouraged, and that the sponsorship of American companies
may be a strong argument to take the event there, but complicating
things for most of the most active community members does not sound as
the wisest step to me. My two cents*

Best Regards,

Julio Costa

* I say it again, no harm intended. I expect a certain degree of
violence in the replies anyway ;)


On 21 October 2010 17:09, Henk Hoff <toffehoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> The host city of the 5th edition of State of the Map is chosen to be Denver,
> Colorado. The event will take place in September 2011.
> Here's the
> announcement: http://opengeodata.org/denver-to-host-2011-state-of-the-map
> You can read the Denver-bid
> here: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/State_Of_The_Map_2011/Bid/Denver
> Cheers,
> Henk Hoff
> SotM organizing team
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at openstreetmap.org
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
>
>



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