Welcome Message

Victoria, British Columbia is pleased to respond to the Request for Proposals to host the FOSS4G 2007 conference. We believe that our proposal will provide the conference a great venue, backed by a strong committee, in one of the most beautiful cities in North America.

Victoria has been a center of geomatics research and development since the 1980's, and has long had a strong community of experts in geomatics software, photogrammetry, maritime charting, and land use management. More recently, Victoria has been the home of a number of prominent open source geospatial projects: PostGIS, JUMP, JTS, GEOS, and uDig were all initially developed and released in Victoria!

As our venue, we have selected the Victoria Conference Centre, located in downtown Victoria. The centre has sufficient space to host a conference of up to 1200 people, with as many as 10 simultaneous break-outs, and we have secured the entire facility for the period of September 24 to 27, 2007. The centre includes a 400 seat performance auditorium, and a central hall with capacity for a plenary session of up to 1200 people. There is also plentiful space for a show floor.

To accommodate hands-on workshops, we have budgeted for the rental of 40 laptop computers, and have been offered the use of a further 15 workstations by the City of Nanaimo. Depending on workshop demand, we may run workshops throughout the conference period, to maximize the use of the workshop rooms. There is sufficient room in the conference centre to simultaneously host one or two workshops concurrently with a full program of talks.

Accommodations in downtown Victoria are plentiful and varied, ranging from the internationally known Empress Hotel on the Inner Harbour to the International Youth Hostel in the old town -- in all there are over 3200 rooms within walking distance of the conference centre.

Regular flights from Seattle (SEA) and Vancouver (YVR) to Victoria International Airport (YYJ) mean than most cities in North American and major cities in Europe and Asia are only "2 hops" from Victoria.

We have formed a local conference committee that represents a broad swathe of geospatial practitioners, from the private sector, academia, and all levels of government. Our committee has the understanding of geospatial and open source to build a strong program, bring in great speakers, and attract sponsors locally and across the world.

To allow the committee to put on a top quality event without the burden of doing all the organizing on a volunteer basis, we have engaged with Sea to Sky Meeting Management, a local company with a strong record of putting on events of this magnitude in Victoria and Vancouver.

Our preliminary budget for the event indicates a projected cost of about $510US per attendee for workshops and conference. This figure is predicated on the assumption of achieving the same sponsorship level as the previous FOSS4G conference. If OSGEO is willing to guarantee a portion ($50-$100K) of the sponsorship target, a more aggressive sponsorship target could be set, and attendee fees lowered accordingly.

Victoria is ready to put together a world-class conference, and bring the community together again to move open source geospatial forward. We look forward the opportunity.

Yours,

The Victoria Organizing Committee

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