\title{From the President}
%\author{Arnulf Christl, OSGeo President}
\maketitle

During the past year OSGeo has grown and matured. As far as I can tell the
past year was a thorough success. But how can we measure the success of a
non-profit organization like OSGeo? A good measure is always to compare
numbers. For example the number of graduated projects, the number of
subscribers to mailing lists, the number of public appearances at
conferences, in presentations, trade shows and case studies. Also the number of
Wiki edits, software releases, bug fixes and the evergreen "lines of
code". These are only a few quantifiable indicators that shed some light
on the health of OSGeo. And all of them show steady growth, find out more about
the details in this Journal.

During the same past year world economy took a hard blow. More and more
financial experts have to admit that there are very concrete limits to
growth. A growing number of financial institutes have already collapsed,
large industries stumble and fall, employees lose their jobs and in the
wake of this global downfall whole economies have come to a painful
grinding halt.

Eventually the growth curve of OSGeo may also flatten out, but not quite
yet. There are still too many people left to teach about the viability of Open
Source Geospatial Software and there is still too much profit in learning
about the opportunities that arise from having access to free spatial data
and educational material. But what comes to my mind when I look at the
quantifiable success of OSGeo is that it appears to be yet another
business that is driven by revenue and the need to meet its investors'
expectations. But who are the employees and who are the investors?

First let's have a look at who "runs" the fundation. It seems obvious when you have a president and board of directors. These directors decide that something needs to
be done, tells the CEO to do it and then it happens.  Unfortunately, it does
not work this way.  As the Executive Director is our only employee, he has to focus on things that really need to get done.  Beyond that we are dependent entirely on volunteers.  The most the president and directors can often do is politely ask people whether they would be interested in doing this or
that.  Some believe we are such a small and "managed" organisation "run" by a few individuals who have the power. I can very much assure you that OSGeo does not work this way.

How does it work if everybody has different expectations of what OSGeo
is, what it should be and what it can do. It works because OSGeo is an
active community of people who \textbf{do} things.  Furthermore, OSGeo does not
\textbf{have} a community but the community \textbf{is} OSGeo. The community invents
OSGeo as it progresses. That needs some explaining. Over the past three years
OSGeo has developed into a fairly complex beast.  However, it does not exist out
of itself but is just the collective representation of many individual
resources. OSGeo is crowd sourced (and maybe even a bit RESTful) and will also grow and shrink depending on the interest and availability of its membership.

As a legal entitiy OSGeo needs some formal structure. In a nutshell, OSGeo
consists of currently 73 voted charter members who vote for 9 directors
who vote for one president (currently me). The board then appoints the Executive Director
(Tyler Mitchell) who takes care of a whole stack of required formalities
like handling finances, signing contracts in the name of OSGeo and
communicating with sponsors. The board has to approve the budget and find
ways to actually fund it, for example by inviting sponsors (the investors)
and promoting FOSS4G (acquire funding). Formal committees are created  to
address different topics, each of them has a list of members who vote for
a chair who becomes an officer and Vice President of OSGeo. Thats it.

All the RESTful action in OSGeo is done by folks who either have a
commercial interest or simply find it fun to do things. Some (like me) are in
the lucky situation that they can combine the fun part with the money
making bit and can thus afford to spend some time on nitty gritty details
of "running" OSGeo. If you are interested and have the capacity to also do
this kind of job then please pay attention to the upcoming elections. Anybody
(that includes you) can nominate Charter Members, this year as every year
it will grow by 15 individuals. Then the Charter Members will vote for the
board of directors who will vote for a president. Same story, each year.

But please note that the grunt work within OSGeo is done by people who have no formal role
and who couldn't care less about having one. If you want OSGeo to do something then you
will just have to \textbf{do} it. Want more education? Go teach people, create
training material or design courses. If you want to formally change
something then please join the corresponding committee. Think that we
need better spatial data licenses? Go make them. Think we need more case
studies? Go create them. Can you see it now?
OSGeo is nothing without you. Correction: ...nothing without you \textbf{doing} it.

Thank you for a cool year of "running" the organization.

\address{Arnulf Christl (aka Seven)\\ OSGeo President \\ Bonn, Germany \\ \email{arnulf AT osgeo.org} }
