FOSS4G'13

Enough boring stuff, let's have some good news.

I visited Ordnance Survey yesterday and met with Peter ter Haar and our very own Ian Holt.

The OS wish to be a top level sponsor of the event, I suggested that we were looking for £25,000 for that level and Peter confirmed that "should be ok". We won't be able to bill them until April of next year due to government financial years but sponsorship of FOSS4G will be in their budget.

I asked Peter what they sought to gain from sponsoring FOSS4G 2013, his responses were quite interesting so I wanted to share with you:

1. The use of open source is an internal efficiency issue for OS
2. They want to reduce their dependency on a small number of suppliers
3. Proprietary licensing models tend to hinder uptake particularly on the web where patterns are unpredictable
4. OS want to help the open source community to grow, sponsorship is one of their ways of putting something back.

We can subtly use some of those messages in promoting FOSS4G 2013 to other sponsors.

We do not have a signed sponsorship agreement yet so please treat this as confidential for the LOC team only.

In other sponsorship news Chris has confirmed that we have received payment from EDINA for the academic bursaries, thanks to Addy.

Cheers

Steven