hi, I had addressed a couple of mails on this subject. I think it is time to be more elaborate, and we need help from this group to take things further.
Icfoss is an autonomous institution set up by the government of Kerala to promote open source (http://icfoss.in/). I happened to meet the director at a conference and was surprised to find that he knew what he was talking about. He was raving about all the good work a friend of his was doing for google maps. I introduced him to osm, and he was enthusiastic about the concept and felt a workshop should be conducted in tvm to build up the community and to get the government interested. After some discussion he has offered to fund the venue, lunch and snacks and infrastructure for a one day workshop and he has duly booked a venue for the 18th. However he has 2 constraints: 1 he wanted the sanction of the OSM community to conduct the workshop - since we do not have a formal community here, I contacted Mikel who was good enough to send a formal letter of support in his capacity as a member of the OSMF council which solved that problems. 2. he needs one or more local volunteers to liase with icfoss and do the ground work like making sure the venue is ready, registering the delegates etc. Here I am stuck as all the people I knew in Kerala are now in Bangalore. The volunteers need not be OSM people - people interested in learning about it are enough. There are some more points I need to make, but I want this mail to go out today - I will follow up tomorrow. Opportunities like this do not come up very often - it would be good for the community if we can make best use of it. -- regards Kenneth Gonsalves _______________________________________________ Talk-in mailing list Talk-in@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-in
