Building on Peter's comments:
1. FOSS4G should move around the world, and hence I would expect that
Europe would be selected before the Americas for 2010. I suggest the
Americas re-submit their bids for 2011 - 2013 until they win. If you
have a strong bid, it will eventually be selected. I think your biggest
threat is someone submitting a bid from South or Central America.
2. I think cities should have a strategy for bidding at least twice
before winning. This gives the bidding committee a better chance to plan
good world coverage of FOSS4G, and also gives local regions more time to
build up local networks.
So unless the city next to you won the conference, an unsuccessful
proposal one year means you are in a much stronger position the
following year.
3. The OSGeo conference committee should give some guidelines about
regions they would like to see bids from in future years in order to
reduce people wasting effort pulling a bid together. In particular, I
expect that Europe will be less likely to selected for 2011/2012. But
keep in mind that you should be putting at least 2 bids in before
expecting to be selected.
4. Smaller regional conferences should be encouraged. It seems that
there are ~ 250 to 300 international OSGeo participants who will attend
OSGeo where ever it is held. The remaining 300+ delegates need to be
drawn locally. I think we are ready to have local "off-season"
conferences, which I reckon should start as OSGeo workshops as proposed
by Paul Ramsey earlier.
Peter Batty wrote:
Eric, I hadn't had a chance to respond to your initial post directly.
To be honest my feeling is that the primary factor in the selection
was simply that it has been longer since there was a FOSS4G in Europe
than it has been since there was one in North America. Hence the
ongoing discussion on the OSGeo conference list about the merits of
being more explicit about conference location as one of the selection
criteria (and/or having more regional conferences, which I favor).
On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 9:47 PM, Eric Wolf <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I wrote this last night after mulling over the Denver LOC's loss
in bidding for FOSS4G 2010:
An interesting thing happened today. The proposal from Barcelona,
Spain for hosting the Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial
in 2010 won the committees vote. Right before the election, Peter
Batty and I were attempting to understand what factors might
impact the vote.
But first, a little background. Peter and I lead a group (the
Denver Local Organizing Committee – or LOC) that put together a
competing proposal to host the conference in Denver. We put
together an all-star LOC from North American geospatial bloggers,
experienced industry leaders, significant FOSS contributors, US
Government researchers and academics. We teamed up with the
Geospatial Information Technology Association (GITA) who would
manage the logistics of hosting, what we estimated, would be a
1000+ attendee conference.
In addition to our proposal and the winning proposal from
Barcelona, submissions were made from Beijing, China and Utrecht,
The Netherlands. We had a great deal of confidence going into the
vote. Our proposal was very professional and extremely well
organized and directly addressed the issues mentioned in the RFP.
This was born out in the fact that we had less than half the
number of questions posed to the other bidding groups in the first
round of questions and significantly less time was spent
discussing issues with our proposal in the final IRC discussion.
We had a fantastic proposal, a great organizing committee and the
support of a well-respected organization handling the logistics.
So, what happened?
Like so many coincidences in life, I happen to be preparing for my
comprehensive exams. One of the three areas I am being tested over
is "Critical Cartography". So I've been reading lots of Denis
Wood, J. Brian Harley, Denis Cosgrove, Gunar Olsson, Jeremy
Crampton, etc., etc. This reading guided part of the discussion
with Peter as the votes were being tallied.
One way to look at FOSS4G is as a resistance response to the power
of commercial software, especially ESRI's ArcGIS. Much of Harley's
conception of the map, historically, was through a Foucauldian
discourse of power. Maps reflect a position of power. Maps,
historically, have been used to define boundaries and guide wars.
But, in accordance with Foucault, power cannot truly exist without
resistance. If we grant ESRI the same position of power as Harley
grants maps and cartography, then the resistance to that power is
FOSS4G.
In the US, we specifically value capitalism and commercialism. We
admire, as heroes, men like Bill Gates and Jack Dangermond. Open
Source software consistently struggles against the Fear,
Uncertainty and Doubt generated by the commercial software
developers. We feel the need for support structures of technical
support and legal entities to sue. Consider the roe against Dell
when they outsourced their customer service to India. Americans
would get irate if they heard someone with a foreign accent on the
end of the line. But for the rest of the world, commercial support
ALWAYS has a foreign accent – an American accent! Americans like
power – and they mistake it for security. No one ever got fired
for buying IBM. And no one ever will get fired for buying ESRI.
The Denver LOC proposed a large, commercially-focused FOSS4G 2010
conference. This proposal very much reflected the American values.
Let's find a way to marry open source with commercial interests!
We'll have over a thousand participants… and skiing!
It's my belief that the vote worked out to a debate over whether
OSGeo wanted the conference to become just another part of the
American power structure or to use it to grow the resistance where
it is strongest. Even the choice of Barcelona over Utrecht seems
to support his argument. Utrecht's proposal, like the Denver
proposal, was very thorough and well supported by both commercial
and non-commercial interests. While Utrecht would have kept the
conference in Europe, it wouldn't have fostered resistance to
Western, capitalist values and the power represented by ESRI to
the same degree as much as Barcelona.
It is important to note that the Beijing organizing committee
challenges with language barriers. Further, they estimated that
only 10% of the attendees would be international. So their
proposal looked much more like a regional conference and less like
the international conference OSGeo was looking for.
The resistance to American commercial power in geospatial software
is created through the efforts of individuals and organizations.
The resistance is frequently due economic exclusion from the power
of ESRI software. But even in many corners of American academics,
we see this resistance, usually due to Redmond's inability to
respond to their needs. It is appropriate that OSGeo chose to keep
FOSS4G out of America. The resistance needs to build.
So, how do we reconcile the power and resistance? Maybe America
can help the world understand the value of Free Geospatial Data
while starting to listen to the rest of the world (or even the
local voices) about the utility of FOSS4G. Maybe Americans can
begin to understand that an investment in FOSS improves the
quality and capability. Perhaps FOSS does entail hiring more
intelligent IT people – but that investment pays off in the long run.
Just some thoughts… See you in Sydney in 2009 and Barcelona in 2010!
-=--=---=----=----=---=--=-=--=---=----=---=--=-=-
Eric B. Wolf 720-209-6818
USGS Geographer
Center of Excellence in GIScience
PhD Student
CU-Boulder - Geography
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W: +1 303 339 0957 M: +1 720 346 3954
Blog: http://geothought.blogspot.com
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Think Globally, Fix Locally
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