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

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Sun Oct 24 11:14:55 BST 2010


Hi,

Julio Costa Zambelli wrote:
> I would not argue if a German city bids for the event (as long as
> English is still considered the "lingua franca" for it ;) 

I'm in Germany and I have always objected to the idea (even though there 
were many people in Amsterdam suggesting a location in Germany for the 
next SOTM). Not that it's my call but whenever someone asked me I said 
that OSM in Germany is strong enough already and doesn't need the extra 
PR afforded by such a conference. (Plus, we have a national OSM 
conference and two large non-OSM conferences that will have an OSM day 
or OSM track in 2011.)

I appreciated that quite a few overseas visitors made their way to SOTM 
at Girona even though it meant a long trip for just a weekend, so maybe 
it is a bit unfair to expect them to come to Europe, but not Europeans 
to go elsewhere. The main concern I personally have with the Denver 
location is that I felt that SOTM at Girona was too sponsor-heavy 
already and I think that a US location will not exactly help to reverse 
that trend, but I'm aware that I am more sensitive to this than the 
average SOTM visitor so this is probably more a personal preference.

But even if I personally might decide not to go, I still think it's 
entirely ok for the project to hold SOTM in the US. It may be true that 
currently most OSM developers and application makers are in Europe but 
there's a huge untapped potential of people in the US, and whatever they 
bring to the project will benefit all of us.

In one of the following years, I think we should go to Asia for the same 
reasons.

Bye
Frederik

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



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