FOSS4G Archiving inputs
Posted by Suchith Anand on August 23, 2012
Hi all,
We need to start thinking of plans on how we archive all materails from FOSS4G 2013. My suggestion is that we aim to archive not just the papers but also all materails including workshop tutorials, posters, presentation slides etc, so that this is available long term to the community. We can also then share the same structure used for helping archiving future FOSS4G conferences.
It is important to have this planned in advance . My suggestion is that we make use of the ELOGeo repository by having a seperate section for FOSS4G 2013 and customise it as per our requirements. Please let me know your suggestions/thoughts on this before 4 Sep, so that we can discuss in our LOC meeting and get actions planned.
Suchith
Comments
Jo Cook on August 23, 2012:
There are two sides to archiving materials- and my personal feeling is that they belong in two separate places.
The first is the organisational materials- eg the website, the mailing lists and this basecamp. There is a long established tradition of storing them on the osgeo svn with links out from the wiki, and I see absolutely no reason to change that. I have already been putting materials into the svn, such as our proposal documentation. This element doesn't really need any planning or actions IMHO.
The other element is the products of the conference, and as you say, ELOGeo seems like the ideal place for this. What additional customisation do you think would be required- given that there is already an informal agreement to start archiving all conference products from previous FOSS4Gs there?
Jo
Barry Rowlingson on August 23, 2012:
GISRUK I ran round at the end of the conference between PCs collecting up
random PDFs and .PPTs scattered on various folders on the lecture theatre
PCs, as speakers would just turn up two minutes before the session with
their presentation (normally all called 'presentation.pdf') on a USB stick.
Cue fun problems with Windows PCs and drivers, and also people plugging in
their own computers and trying to get their wide-screen presentations to
fit onto a square projector.
At the other extreme, the statistical conference I went to last year
required all speakers, 24 hours before their talk, to give their
presentation materials to someone at a PC who then copied them to a network
drive with a directory structure that mirrored the sessions. Session chairs
then just opened the relevant folder at T-2minutes and all the talks were
there.
Plugging in your own machine wasn't allowed. But then that was a boring
conference, with nobody doing fancy demos or running software. But it did
mean that all they had to do was drag their network drive to a web drive
and all the presentations were on the web.
I think a middle way is probably ideal - set up a shared folder system and
if presentations arrive at T-2mins they should be put in the right place
for easy post-conference archiving, and not just splatted on the desktop.
This is predicated on the venue having this capability of course.
Speakers should be allowed to plug their own PCs (there would be a riot if
the Apple Mac crowd couldn't run their Keynote presentations) but the
speaker may be chained to the table until their presentation files are
transferred to the venue PC for archiving. If a speaker leaves a room
without giving up their files, it can be very hard to get them - there's
little incentive, especially when beers are waiting.
While I'm brain-dumping here, do we insist on open formats?
Suchith Anand on August 23, 2012:
By customising I mean having separate sections for tutorials, presentations etc , that authors can themselves upload either before (that will be ideal) or after the conference.
Suchith
This message and any attachment are intended solely for the addressee and may contain confidential information. If you have received this message in error, please send it back to me, and immediately delete it. Please do not use, copy or disclose the information contained in this message or in any attachment. Any views or opinions expressed by the author of this email do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Nottingham.
This message has been checked for viruses but the contents of an attachment
may still contain software viruses which could damage your computer system:
you are advised to perform your own checks. Email communications with the
University of Nottingham may be monitored as permitted by UK legislation.
Jo Cook on August 23, 2012:
To Barry- personally I'd say yes- let's insist on odp and/or pdf but we might want to seek consensus on that...