Hi, I have no idea what the CWG vote was on and I can't find the up to date minutes to check it. Despite this, you much surely recognise the issue. For example, even if we restrict the banners to just those promoting conferences then we could easily have a rotation of 5 or more banners:
* SOTM * SOTM-EU * SOTM-US * OSM Plus * SOTM Scotland * etc.. Extend this to other non-conference meet-ups and the number could easily quadruple. == Possible Solutions == A good place to start is to improve the events page. At the moment we have the wiki events calendar and http://calendar.openstreetmap.org.uk/map . The wiki is complicated - I have no idea how to add an event to this, but things could be improved. This events page can then have it's own dedicated banner on osm.org. To help boost awareness, there are several solutions. Here in the West Midlands, UK, we keep an eye out for new active mappers and message those who are more active through the OSM messaging system. During the summer months we take our monthly meet-up on tour to increase participation in smaller towns away from Birmingham. This works well. Furthermore, we also keep an eye out for local "Open Data" / "Hack days" or similar, and try to ensure that at least one OSM member attends each event. I also believe that a email distribution list would help. The concern is that nobody has signed up to an email when they joined OSM so perhaps we cannot start emailing them without an opt in. This is not an issue for me as we can create a sign-up page and promote it on OSM.org for the next few months. The current OSM new member sign up procedure can be changed to include the opt-in for emails. In my opinion, you could have people sign up to two email distributions: 1. A general monthly OSM update (based on the monthly blogs that are already being written) 2. An events email. For this people sign up to receive monthly emails about events within a user specified geographical region (e.g. x miles/km of some point). Regrettably, my technical skills aren't up to much, so I would struggle to do the 2nd. I am however happy to help with the first if (i) Pascal, Dennis and the “Wochennotiz” guys are happy for me to repost some of their content, (ii) I get reassurances that I can advertise the email sign up via a banner on osm.org for a period of 3 to 6 months, and (iii) the new member sign up procedure is updated. Hope this inspires some more possible solutions, Rob
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