StateoftheMap Organizing Committee/Minutes/2015/2014-12-17 Meeting

December 17th, 2014

Present

• Henk
• RobJN
• Richard Weait
• Gregory Marler
• Randy Meech
• Gonzalo Perez
• Fernando Sanz

Agenda and minutes

Meeting started: 21:00 GMT.

What are people’s expectation for the SotM Working Group? Rob: Have a more persistent group E.g. would be nice to reuse website platform etc, so focus is on organising conference

Fernando: Make a framework/knowledge-base for different teams (SotM-20xx and regional events). Like Rob, to avoid relearning each year.

Rob: A question to be addressed is relationship between OSMF-run SotM and other OSM usergroup SotMs/events. One venue bid was withdrawn the following day and picked up by SotM-US.

Randy: I’m the one responsible for posting & pulling the New York bid. We spoke to some on US board and OSMF board. US tends to be bigger (DC last year was ~600). It was put in as the US was taking a while to decide.

Rob: even if we have confs alongside each other, the different orgs should talk to each other and discuss their problems.

Randy: What about deputising regional conferences?

Gregory: issue partially from OSMF getting a bit behind on schedule.

Henk: Before Argentina there was discussion about having Spring/Summer/Autumn spaced conferences. Then got derailed by US-NY being in an odd spot to do that separation this year. Can we lift this group up as a co-ordinator, to organise (dates) SotMs around the world? Then each year decide which to put a spotlight on. Provide knowledge bases, and guidelines to keep “SotM” great & not watered down, to each local organiser.

Fernando: Help we got from Rob was really helpful, we should do stuff like this.

Gonzalo: our regional communities are very strong now.

Several regional/country events happen annually. France, Japan, Scotland, SotM EU, OSMit (Italy).

Henk: Would be nice to have two major conferences: US, Europe. Some people think OSMF should be responsible for SotM Europe and OSM-US responsible for one there, I(Henk) not really happy about that. Bigger conferences elsewhere are good. E.g. SotM Africa might be tricky for sponsorship, would be good to have deals “SotM-US sponsorship gets you also supporting SotM Africa”.

Rob: This is where OSMF roaming SotM should be helping outreach in other countries. Concern is if you miss a year for a country you get people drift away, have to balance jumping around and coming back to the home countries.

Henk: EU is different from US. EU not by an organisation, so makes it more complicated.

Greg: SotM EU came from “SotM is too far away from us this year” and tends to run as the runner-up bid, which is why it isn’t annually.

Rob: There’s concern about the low number of bids each year. Hence we need that supporting SotM platform and to encourage far countries to bid.

Randy: It’s important for the next SotM to be expertly run. NY proposal was taken as there’s a track record. Themes looked for were Geographic diversity to move the conf into places to expand, and people there on the ground to mitigate the risk of conf not being popular.

Henk: we are 40mins into the call. Let’s get some conclusions and action items of what we’re going to do. There is a general idea we need to get into a co-ordinating role. We need to go into remote places still. We need to have a strong group of us to mitigate risk of local group issues.

Richard W: We need to make it clear the group is well organised, how are we going to give that appearance?

Rob: What venue are we running, Venice?

Henk: Yes if confirmed by team, and date agreed.

Rob: I’m happy to help out with Venice and not get buried in the detail so that the process is put in place for set of knowledge/instructions in place to carry quality next year.

Rob left the meeting at this point

Henk: We need to have a co-ordinator, as Richard was pointing towards. Chasing people and arranging meetings time.

everyone looks at Henk, on the audio call

Fernado: Rob and Harry sent us e-mails about the website, so we could work on reusing and maintaining that. We could set-up a sub-working-group.

Gonzalo: Thinking about problems, to make the work easier as Fernado said we could make the website easier to manage the information. We need to set some priorities for SotM organisation that will be done many months before the conference (e.g. venus booking). We could be doing that, so the local team works more on the programme and local information etc.

Henk: Similar to as Rob said, there are a lot of things that can be done like guides and templates and time schedule guides for the local group. Might be good for you (Gonzalo) and Rob to team up on those guide type things.

Randy: Got to leave now, but really interested in helping with funding.

Henk: Timing for our meetings?

Randy: There will be a bit of an ebb in time, key thing is to set a venue now.

Henk: half-way January? Time similar to this good for everyone?

Richard: update contact list for everyone would be good.

Henk: yes, I’ll bring team[at]stateofthemap.org back to this group of people and I can make someone else an admin of the list (Fernando). We’re largely in the same idea of what this WG is to be. We have people dedicated on focusing on certain items. I’ll put up a doodle poll for this time of day for our next meeting. I’ll try to get in touch with Venice again. We’ll try to get a date sent with them as soon as possible.

Richard: Happy to help with Venice communication.

Henk: It’s been a productive meeting, I thank Richard for pushing me on that.

Gonzalo: Should we define some goals/aims for the working group?

Henk: We need to groom over this document and get the action items out. Henk looks at Greg to do that.

Greg briefly stops minuting to accept.

Meeting finished 22:03 GMT.