Geospatial BoF in Chicago

Hey All! Hope everyone is having a great New Year!

So, DrupalCon Chicago is coming up in a couple months. And as usual, I was hoping to do a Drupal and Geospatial BoF (Birds of Feathers). These are usually good as they are much more discussion focused and informal than sessions. But I had a few things to possibly discuss up front:

• Do people find these useful? This is not the first time we have done this. If you have been before, do you think its worth your time? If you are new, does it sound useful?
• How can we be more efficient/effective in the BoFs? In reality, this is the only hour we have as this subset of the Drupal community to talk on this topic in person twice a year. So, should we be trying to be more structured about how this happens?
• What have we done since Copenhagen? I wrote down some notes from our discussion in Copenhagen? We have accomplished some of these things, but are we really moving forward effectively?
• How can we make sure new tasks get done going forward? After we decide on what we want to do, how do we ensure it gets done?
• How can we communicate better to people who cannot make it in person? Obviously not everyone that is interested can make it to DrupalCons. Maybe we should be more deliberate about how to communicate discussions.
• Can we eliminate meet 'n greet (and create an agenda up front)? DrupalCon is definitely all about the people, but to get the most out of the hour we have, we could eliminate the greeting part and ensure that we have an agenda going in.
• What should we discuss? What topics do we want to talk about?
• Should we have two BoFs (developers and support)? It might be best to have one BoF that is for developers and people interested in actually trying to further the geospatial efforts in Drupal, and then do one for people that are just looking for support and basic usage of these modules.

My personal opinion on all of this: I really like the geospatial area in Drupal and think there is great work being done. And I like the BoFs that I have been a part of over the past couple years. But I feel like they are in between a basic support group and a structured committee on furthering geospatial efforts in Drupal, and that both of these are good separately, but the in-between is not very helpful to anyone. I am not promoting one module/idea over another and I think "competition" is good, but I do not like to see disparate efforts. My main goal is just to help facilitate people working together and hopefully towards a common goal which is best for the community. So, I am all about trying to separate out the BoF to more of a developers committee and having an agenda going in and trying more effectively to have a "Geo Stack" or GeoCMS in Drupal.