Thoughts on a NW a mini-conf

[Michael Gerlek]

Sorry it has taken so long to get this out, but here are my initial

thoughts on hosting a mini-conference.  Feel free to spread this to

other geo folks you know that live in the targeted regional areas.

 

If I get enough positive responses to this, I'll go ahead and set up a

mailing list and we'll take it to the next level...

 

-mpg, rushing in where angels fear to tread

 

 

 

High-level Goals

----------------

  - low-budget, no frills

  - regionally focused (PDX/SEA/VNC)

  - healthy mix of workshops/codesprint/talks

 

 

Audience

--------

  - likely to be 75% attendees developer-oriented

  - I'd like to +25% attendees be GIS users interested in open source

alternatives

  - drawn from Portland-Seattle-Vancouver axis, with perhaps some Idaho

& Alaska folks

  - how many people would we need to make a viable, critical mass?  50?

75? 100?

 

 

Location and Venue

------------------

  - I'm partial to Seattle, but am welcome to hearing from other locales

if they want to take this one

  - finding a venue is likely to be the critical factor

  - hotel? university? supportive non-profit with space?

  - need to provide options for lodging as well

  - venue should have large room, several smaller rooms, etc

  - venue must have solid WiFi

 

 

Funding

-------

  - prefer people only pay for (transport + food + lodging) and (1/N of

the venue costs)

  - not planning to make money on this, but can't afford to take a loss

  - should we try to get sponsors? -- could pay for food, defray venue

costs, ..?

 

 

Marketing

---------

  - entirely done by word of mouth & on the net

  - no cash expenses needed

 

 

Program

-------

  - likely to run 3 days

  - four components to the program:

    - code sprint

    - workshops

    - regular talks

    - open BOF/discussion periods

 

 

Dates

------

  - likely to be March or April of 2009

  - a long weekend seems best -- Thu-Sat or Fri-Sun or such

 

 

Next steps

----------

 

1- develop list of big-shots and influencers in the targetted regional

areas, to try and gauge support for the idea

   - Seattle: the CUGOS gang; someone from Google?; someone from

Microsoft?; someone from UW?

   - Portland: ?

   - Vancouver: Paul Ramsey, Jason Birch, TylerM, etc?

   - Alaska: ?

   - Idaho: Daniel Ames? (MapWindow GIS)

 

2- determine options for host city and venue

 

3- set up separate mailing list for the discussion

 

[Hal Mueller]

Having a heavy-hitter cosponsor could help with venue. Microsoft has
great training facilities. I have been to ham radio events there, and
a couple of Palm user group meetings were there when MS was trying to
woo Palm OS users. Harder to get there than Seattle proper,
discourages people coming in by train from Vancouver/PDX.

Google hosted the Mac developer group in Fremont a couple of months
back for a special meeting when a Google guy was presenting and we
anticipated a huge crowd.

Hmm, other ham radio events have been at Law Enforcement training
facility, South Seattle Community College, Seattle Pacific University.

Seattle Mind Camp was at Synapse in downtown Seattle. Don't know
anything about the event/facility except that they were trying to be
low budget.

Startups and incubators might want to play/cosponsor: Pathable for
badges/networking (pathable.com), StartPad coworking space http://startpad.org
, maybe others. SeattleTech mailing list a good place to find these
places.

Hal

[Alan McConchie]

On Nov 11, 2008, at 2:44 PM, Michael Gerlek wrote:

1- develop list of big-shots and influencers in the targetted regional

areas, to try and gauge support for the idea

  - Seattle: the CUGOS gang; someone from Google?; someone from

Microsoft?; someone from UW?

  - Portland: ?

  - Vancouver: Paul Ramsey, Jason Birch, TylerM, etc?

  - Alaska: ?

  - Idaho: Daniel Ames? (MapWindow GIS)

There might be overlap with the neogeographers in Portland who recently hosted WhereCamp PDX:
http://www.wherecamppdx.org/

Alan McConchie
(A Vancouver-based lurker who hasn't yet attended a CUGOS meeting)

[Skuld]

One consideration may be to ask REI to donate their conference rooms,
if it is a smallish conference... I worked at a housing program for
homeless adults in Seattle and the Seattle REI donated use of their
conference room to us for a staff retreat. They are generally pretty
good about supporting local stuff and may even be able to tie it in to
a mobile mapping/gps workshop thing if there is any interest in going
that way... may be a good way to build some local community
participation and interest as well if we had a open-to-the-community
workshop that they could advertise for their members. If there is
interest in this I can talk to my friend, who is the community
outreach manager...

I also have a Drupal developer who is willing to give a talk about
using OS content management in coordination with OS GIS if wanted.

This sounds awesome, I'll keep my brain working on things and follow
this thread.

S
[Portland lurker who hasn't yet attended a CUGOS meeting! Maybe PDX
and Vancouver (if you mean WA) should unite.]

[Alan McConchie]

On Nov 11, 2008, at 6:02 PM, Skuld wrote:
>
> [Portland lurker who hasn't yet attended a CUGOS meeting! Maybe PDX
> and Vancouver (if you mean WA) should unite.]

Oops, after living in Portland for a couple years, I should've been
more careful about that. I meant Vancouver, BC. Up here most of the
OSGEO fun seems to be in Victoria (but I would love to be proven wrong
if there are others here in Vancouver, BC).

Alan

[karsten]

Great start Michael,

I like the no frills - low cost approach a lot. I'm looking from input
from other lusts and people I contacted and hopefully will get some
good responses soon - especially about a suitable location. Some
thoughts on this

Re Audience

> - likely to be 75% attendees developer-oriented
> - I'd like to +25% attendees be GIS users interested in open source

I think that there is a very likely chance that this might surprise us
positively for non-developer attendance. I'm a self proclaimed
advocate of FOSS4G users ( being less of a develop per myself - more
of a hacker and user). Here are some observation I made over the
course of the last year:
WAURISA Conference (held in May in Seattle had about 300+ attendees
and hosted an Open Source GIS workshop for one day with an attendance
of 50+ -people - most non-developers. Josh L. talked about feature
server, Jubal H. about the use of OS GIS at CH2M Hill and I talked
about OS Web GIS... all of those talks had 50-80 people in it . So
definitely there is growing interest out there. A year ago in 2007
WAURISA had only two talks that involved FOSS4G...
Same thing when I offed recently some free webinars about FOSS4G - I
had 30 and 40 people signed up on each demo I did. So I would expect
great interest form that community - I can offer to target getting
that audience to join us at the conferrence...
Also That is to say I would try hard to have a lot of talks for people
that are new to OS and will be likely joining more as users than
developers (because I think this is a big short coming in the IS
community still to address more the needs of (new) users...)

> - venue must have solid WiFi

Great to have , but I take it also as nice to have - shouldn't be a
killer in case we had a great location with a great price (free?) that
doesn't have it. I guess for the code sprint and such we will have to
expect a small fraction of the people to join in (10-20 max I guess)
which could wrap up the whole thing a cosier and (more affordable)
location with high speed web access in case we need to ?

> Funding

> - prefer people only pay for (transport + food + lodging) and (1/N of
> the venue costs)
> - not planning to make money on this, but can't afford to take a loss
> - should we try to get sponsors? -- could pay for food, defray venue

We should try to. At least for the venue.
Would we allow vendors (of FOSS4G services) to set up booths for a day
or so? I all in for that.
Refractions , DM solutions, Google etc could be candidates.
I would sign up my company TerraGIS to have a booth for sure if we had
that option (we can raise some money with it)

> Marketing

> - entirely done by word of mouth & on the net

That will be good enough !

> Program

> - likely to run 3 days

> - code sprint
Could be the last day and possibly in a smaller location - with fast
web connections etc ?

I think we could start a conference committee to coordinate and
distribute tasks among us ?
Cheers
Karsten

[Paul Ramsey]

FYI, I'm getting pricing from Tacoma convention center and Bell Harbor
convention center.
The way I work it, there's not much budget room...

150 people * $100 = $15K + $3 sponsorship = $18K all in.

That has to cover rooms, AV, signage, copying, trade show setup, WIFI,
and any food we provide.

So, venue info, particularly bearing in mind that you might need to add
- food
- AV (projectors, screens, network connects)
- WIFI
- booths/tables
will be helpful.

P.

[karsten vennemann]

Thanks Paul,

I got a very basic and initial price quote (just to get an idea) for

Lynnwood Convention Center, 3711 196th Street S.W., Lynnwood, Washington
98036

If we go small and get one room for up to 100 people (theater seating) that
is about 360/day
A second room for up to 60 people is about 260/day
The Lynnwood conference center has free Wifi throughout :)

Sure - we can go bigger and add food etc - just initial info here. It's
available for almost all weekends in March/April as of now (although they
would prefer that we do the event Thursday-Saturday, because the are usually
closed on Sundays, but that’s negotiable).

And I am waiting for a quote for the
Northwest Rooms at Seattle Center
http://www.seattlecenter.com/booking/venue_parent_detail.asp?VE_VenueNum=550

And also will be asking Google about possible involvement / hosting choices.

Can anybody check with UW if we have any traction there with Gis/Geography
folks to get us on campus?

Cheers
Karsten

[Michael P. Gerlek]

You guys rock.

If one of you were to ping Island Wood
(http://islandwood.org/conferencesandleadership) too, that'd be good.
They are probably pricey, but the facility is WAY cool...

-mpg

[Michael P. Gerlek]

I think Bremerton also has a new convention centre -- likely to be
(relatively) cheap and have nearby low(er) cost accommodations?

[Roger André]

I've written to Michael T. Jones at Google.  Will let you know what he says.

Roger
--

[Michael P. Gerlek]

Does anyone have any MSFT contacts, e.g. the VE crowd?

 

I have a distant connection to Gary Flake, the head of Live Labs(?), but nothing better than that.

 

-mpg

[Paul Ramsey]

I'll hit Ed Katibah.

BTW, I'm also hitting that Bremerton conv. center.

Someone else hit the Island Wood.

P

[Monika]

Just wanted to chime in on the location issue. How about the
University of Washington. As I have mentioned in the past the
Geospatial Club here at UW would be more than happy to host this
event. Would the US-CFR Forest Club room be suitable? It can hold
around 75 people, plus if we have the UW Geospatial Club host it for
us the venue would be free. A multiday event would be a little harder
to arrange but I am sure it’s possible. The club has a small ($250)
budget for such an event as well, it would cover at least coffee and
refreshments for a day. The UW-CFR is right on Stevens Way and easily
accessible by bus, lots of bike parking too, but car parking will be
an issue. I agree that having a heavy hitter such as Microsoft or
Google as a cosponsor(s) would be the key to success.

[Skuld]

I like Monika's UW suggestion... it would be great to both collaborate
with the UW Geospatial Club and to have a low-barrier first
conference.

[percy]

Hello from Portland :-)

I've been monitoring this discussion with great interest, and I'll do
everything I can to help. I know at least 10 or 15 people who would be
interested in this, and that's without thinking very hard :-)

I currently have the North America OSGEO banner and table skirt from
when I organized our presence at OSCON this year.

On a related note, is CUGOS interested in sending a letter of support
to the Denver organizers for the 2010 FOSS4G? I think if it just says,
"yeah lots of us will attend and we think it's a great idea!!!" it
would suffice. I have posted the letter of support template in the
CUGOS files section. I should probably start a new thread for this ...
Cheers,
Percy

On Nov 11, 3:33 pm, Alan McConchie <alan.mcconc...@gmail.com> wrote: