FOSS4G conference series growth

The recent FOSS4G2006 conference at Lausanne, Switzerland was a great success. It was amazing to see how many people showed up and how many creative ideas they presented there. From Jody’s blog I took some of the next figures, but obviously the conference merge of this year had a longer story. The Lausanne conference was a come together of MUM, GRASS, EOGEO, Java and more folks with their various community conferences. Here a more complete version:

2002	150 people	GRASS Users conference, Trento, Italy (Proceedings)
2003	90 people	MapServer User Meeting, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA (Proceedings?)
2004	150+ people	FOSS4G: GRASS Users Conference, Bangkok, Thailand (Proceedings)
2004	200+ people	MapServer User Meeting and Open Source GIS Conference, Ottawa, Canada (Proceedings)
2005	300+ people	MUM3 – Open Source Geospatial Conference, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA (Proceedings)
2006	500+ people	Free and Open Source Software for Geoinformatics, Lausanne, Switzerland (Proceedings)

2007 you ask? We’ll see, OSGeo.org will publish the call for hosting the conference soon. Some ideas are already floating around. Having 500+ people is nice, maybe we should not aim at 1000+ …