So have you guys thought about running your own conference?
"FOSS4G 2010 West" perhaps?
There are a ton of people with the ability to fly Southwest or use
miles to get to Denver but don't have the time or money to get to the
other side of the planet. Lots of them are still intelligent,
interesting and so on.
I say run your own conference, it's a free country. Whether you choose
to make the dates coincide is up to you.
Best
Steve
On 21 Dec 2008, at 04:47, Eric Wolf 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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