Concerning the conference (and potentially moving it locationwise), I'd like to put things into formal perspective here.

The conference was sponsored by my previous employer, whose name I won't mention here, with an initial commitment made in October 2005. At the time, it was implied that my own involvement was to be kept to a minimum because it was not cost effective for them to have me sidelined on the conference, but that they would be providing other people to manage the conference site and organization. The people who did so were originally tasked perhaps five hours a week on the conference, and when things began to slacken up they went to as much as eight, but for the most part they were not very competent in what they did, requiring far more involvement on my part than my employer felt comfortable. Over time, they were assigned elsewhere, and the site and progress languished.

In late January, this company lost a contract worth nearly $10 million dollars, which made up roughly 80% of its revenues. While it was assumed that they would be able to pick those contracts up quickly, mismanagement of their sales efforts meant that they were down to a point where they were running into a revenue shortfall by mid-April. They reneged upon the agreement to pay for conference space and hotels at that point, forcing me to postpone the conference until October when the rates were more conducive and hopefully buying some time to get outside sponsorship. I left the company in mid-May, and though I was re-employed by July 1, this also put a damper upon my ability to organize as I was spending time negotiating a new position with a different company.

I give this context not to excuse my own inability to manage this project but to provide something of a cautionary tale. Ronan has been spot on in his analysis, as has Doug. I am not doubting Alastair's abilities - I was the one who recommended him after all - but I also think it is worth looking at worst case scenarios here. His company could lose a major contract at an inopportune time, forcing things off the rails again. His employers could decide that his skills are needed elsewhere, and in that situation there's not a lot that he could do, especially if they felt that his work for the conference was taking away from the time necessary to get critical work done. Phillip Mansfield was able to make SVG 2003 work because he was the CEO of Schemasoft - it was his decision to commit to the degree of the company's involvement in the conference, and there were perceived benefits for having done so.

I am not saying that we should hold the conference elsewhere because of this - frankly, I think there are few enough that are in a position in this group to have the freedom anywhere to do this. Rather I think this points out that this conference is better handled if we:

1) Have an independent board (possibly the Netherland organization) that could act as the organization handling fiduciary responsibilities for the conference. This would mean that profits from the conference would go, as they should, to helping fund the next year's conference, rather than being paid out as "profit" to the holders of the conference. I was trying to set up a Canadian company to do the same, but setting up an international NFP takes time and resources that I didn't have (roughly eighteen months in the case of an NFP). This organization would also handle accounting, would be given formal responsibility for hiring and firing chairs and otherwise providing a level of oversight that I see as being critical.

2) Doug proposed, and I'm fully in favor of, setting the sponsorship/exhibition rates reasonably low - a platinum sponsorship was available for $3000, gold for $2000, silver for $1000, and I'd propose a title sponsorship at $5000. We need to get a matrix of sponsors for the conference, not just one or two, for several reasons:

• We need to get more cross pollenization between the business side and the academic side ... I've been talking to a lot of people at conferences outside of the immediate SVG sphere, and the visibility of SVG (and of the conference) is almost non-existent there except in a vaguely fuzzy way. When I'm getting this reaction at a GIS conference (GeoWeb in Vancouver last month) I know that we've got problems here,

• It reduces the fiduciary burden on the hosting organization if we can spread it out in this way,

• it reduces the exposure to the conference if that organization defaults on their obligations,

• It lends credibility to the conference if you have a couple of dozen vendors showing their wares - students (and professors) coming from the academic side see it as a chance to get hired, companies get a chance to see what the latest thinking is on the academic side, and in general everyone walks away happier,

• it makes it easier to negotiate with concessionaires and venue providers if they know that there are business opportunities to be had beyond simply holding the conference itself,

• it makes it easier to convince hosting organizations that this conference is legitimate and that it offers a chance for exposure to potential markets, making it more worthwhile for them to free up not only moneys but also the key personnel necessary to make all this happen.

3) As part of the Netherlands corporation, consider setting up a community based consortium along the likes of OASIS. Individual members can join for 100 Euros (companies for 500 Euros) giving them access to community resources and fora, providing a place for such organizations as clipart.org and other OSS groups to provide a common entry point, advertising vehicles for small (and not-so-small) companies, create educational resources for students, developers and managers, and giving them discounted access to the conference. This refills the coffers and furthers the original goals of the conference, which was to provide awareness and education on SVG and open standards graphical technologies. This has been a big goal of mine for some time, but the business of getting the conference itself organized distracted me from it.

I think the central goal here is to ask which is more important - the conference or the mission of the conference. I for one believe that there has been too much focus on the conference itself (even to the demand of having a cruise every time around) without asking the bigger question of what the intent of the conference was ... which I've always seen as an educational vehicle (though not necessarily an academic one), raising the awareness of the technology's potential and providing a central focus for the community at large.

I dropped the (admittedly very heavy) ball with the conference itself, but I would contend that if we don't rethink what it is we are all trying to do here then we are only setting Alastair up to fail as well, no matter how capable and well intentioned he is. There's been some question as to my wording on the conference and the assertions I've made in the letter I wrote - these were deliberate. I called this a postponement rather than a cancellation because while people may be annoyed at postponements, a cancellation reflects far worse. I will, upon reading the announcement as posted, make some minor revisions to it to make sure that people understand what is going on, but I think that overall we're better served as an organization to say "we made a mistake, we're changing the people handling things and we're going on" than to say "Oops, we canceled it ... please come back later and see if we have our act together."

Finally, an argument about keeping things in Victoria - the risks have been assessed here - we know the contact people for everything from getting venue space at universities or convention centers to who handles printing up bottles or proceedings. It IS a good place to visit, the hotels are facing some serious shortfalls because of the US Visa idiocy and a recently imposed tax by Alaska on cruise ship traffic, and the price of gas is through the roof. They WILL negotiate reasonable rates, but only if we can show that we are capable of acting in good faith ourselves.

Moreover, I could not count on Alastair to help earlier because of his own obligations to his employer at a critical time, and as a newly landed immigrant in Canada my own network was non-existent when I first agreed to take this on (my biggest mistake all told was taking it on in the first place, but I honestly didn't see anyone else coming up to the plate) because I lacked the resources to make it happen. Today, I have most of the organizational resources, Alastair has others at his disposal that I don't, but these were all only acquired after a year's worth of investment of time and reciprocated favors, when we had largely run out of time. I think it would prove a terrible mistake to abandon that investment simply on the basis that the organization wasn't ready to hold a conference in October.

Ronan, Andreas or Ruud, if I may make a recommendation - please talk to Barend about such an organization. It is vital. I do not have final say at this point about where 2007 will be held (I've given my recommendations) but I think that 2008 will be a wash if you do not have this organization in place. Moreover, I would gladly see the 2007 conference under such an organization, as it makes accountability more manageable. Profits after expenses for the conferences would go into the organizational pot, a community membership (the Open Graphics Alliance perhaps) would fund the day-to-day management of the organization, it would make setting up a centralized server more feasible and it would provide a level of continuity that doesn't exist today, to insure that there are no more such train wrecks.

Kurt Cagle