In putting together some words for the Aust-NZ chapters bid to host the 2009 FOSS4G conf, I went looking at what OSGeo stands for and how we could answer that mission in our conf hosting bid. I looked at http://www.osgeo.org/content/foundation/about.html and got the distinct impression it was quite dated.
I don't think it's reasonable to consider OSGeo a nascent organisation anymore. The foundations governance model has been set. We have already expanded to include multiple projects, with even more great projects to come. While the foundation provides organisational support to the wider open source geospatial community, I don't think it's fair to say it provides legal and financial support. Certainly it provides financial support (in terms of structures and processes for financial dealings) to OSGeo projects, but even there the legal support is a very grey area that I don't think anybody is too keen to test. Perhaps we should cast the net a little less far reaching (though perhaps suitably ambiguous?) when making a statement about OSGeo's financial and legal intentions. Any thoughts on what we should be saying? I also noticed (ok, so at this point I was going on the hunt for what else we might want to revisit) that we have no "media centre" links from the front page. Do we have a place where we put all our press releases? We do have them don't we? Surely we have something valuable we want to tell the world? Address current issues? From time to time issues fly around the geoblogsphere, and lots of people here express strongly held views when outrageous things are done and said, but shouldn't the response sometimes come from OSGeo as well? We should probably also have an rss feed on the media content. Well, looks like I've just identified a job that needs doing, and it would be a little petulant of me to complain and expect others to do all the heavy lifting. I'm happy to help out with such an effort, but I can't do it alone. Any help would be appreciated. The faq http://www.osgeo.org/content/faq/foundation_faq.html) also needs updating. I suspect some of the issues may no longer need quite so much attention, while there should be plenty of new material to add. I'll troll through the list archives over the next few weeks and see if I can pick out any with some proposed answers. Feel free to ping me on this one if I take a little too long... Regards, Tim Bowden _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss