Minutes of OSGeo:UK 2020 AGM

28th October 2020 at 12pm, online

Officers and Trustees Present

Jo Cook (Chair), Matt Travis (Treasurer), Ant Scott (Secretary), Alastair Graham, Steven Feldman (Trustees) and seven other members.

Apologies for Absence

Dave Barter

Minutes

The minutes of the 2019 AGM were approved.

Accounts 2019-2020

The Treasurer presented a summary of the accounts, and these were accepted.

• Total Income: £40,495.55 (15,500.00 accrued from 2018/19)
• Total Expenditure: £37,012.09 (3,240.00 pre-paid from 2018/19)
• Profit: £3,483.46 🎉
• Current Balance: £15,408.20 (includes all accounts)

Sponsorship 2019/2020

• Patreon funding of Regina Obe: $60 per month
• Geoserver OGC compliance: €1000
• Geonetwork Sprint: €500

Sponsorship 2020/2021 (so far)

• QGIS Vector Tile development: €800

Past and Future Events

FOSS4G Online 2020 was agreed to have been a success:

• 1,000 registered
• 500-600 attended
• 38 speakers
• 77 countries represented
• 48% of attendees from the UK, with many saying it was the first time they could attend
• Costs were minimal
• OSGeo received about £2,500 in donations, and MapAction about £600

A lessons learned page was created after the event.

Other comments and reflections on the event:

• Ant noted that the involvement of a number of volunteers who had not attended FOSS4G before, inlcuding some from outside the UK, was refreshing
• The YouTube recordings had been valuable, with thousands of views, and a number viewed over 200 times

Future events are dependent as always on a team stepping up to organise - the Committee has no plans to try to do so for now, particularly in the current circumstances. However, if anyone is able to take on organsing an event of any kind, the Committee would offer full support.

Other comments on possible formats for the future:

• Steven mentioned that the AGI are running an event in November, spread over a few hours a day
• Alastair spoke about a JNCC workshop that had been split over two days and which got very good feedback
• Nick Bearman emphasised that the social side is important - see this Twitter thread for some ideas

It was agreed that a lightweight event with short sessions could be useful.

It was proposed that OSGeo:UK should get a paid Zoom subscription to be made available to anyone who wanted to organise an OSGeo-related event. Steven will administer, and will post to the list saying this is available.

Officers

All officers are happy to continue in post for now, though Jo would like to stand down as Chair when someone is willing to take it on. In the meantime, other commitments mean that she may have limited time to contribute.

Steven would like to step down as a Trustee, and was thanked for his enormous contribution to OSGeo:UK over the years. Tom Chadwin volunteered to take his place, and this was unanimously agreed.

AOB

It was proposed that we should sponsor QGIS to the tune of 500 euros. This was agreed in principle, but we should also research other projects with funding requirements. Tom C will do this and share the results - Nick suggested something ecosystem, and Tom Armitage suggested asking for proposals on the mailing list, along with a social media push.

Jo noted that the training calendar should be kept up to date via GitHub.

Jo reported on membership:

• there were no new charter members this year
• the UK has 20 active UK charter members, 4 inactive
• the mailing list has 260 subscribers

It was agreed that we should try to raise our presence:

• OSGeo:UK Twitter is available, and others could contribute - Tom A and Nick agreed to do this (Matt Walker suggested including a sign-off name on tweets)
• Tom A will also post on LinkedIn