OSGeo - User contributions [en]

All Members

2007-10-14T20:28:16Z

Wiki-Watry:

''We should consider moving the content of the '''About''' column to the corresponding user pages (that is what they are meant for) and leave only the list here. MediaWiki is throwing an edit warning that the page is larger than 32kb which can cause trouble in some browsers.''

{| border="1" class="wikitable" style="margin: 1em 1em 1em 0; background: #f9f9f9; border: 1px #aaaaaa solid; border-collapse: collapse;"
! style="background:#efefef;" | Name
! style="background:#ffdead;" | Affiliations
! style="background:#efefef;" | OSGeo Projects
! style="background:#ffdead;" | Location
! style="background:#efefef;" | About
|-
| Add yourself
| Everyone is welcome
| In which OSGeo Projects and Committees are you involved
| Input your latitude and longitude here (and watch out for [[Axis Order Confusion]])
| Copy and paste this entry, put it last, and add your information
|-
| Bobby H. Braswell
| Complex Systems Research Center
| OpenLayers, MapServer, and GDAL/OGR user
| (43.056, -70.775)
| I am a researcher at the University of New Hampshire, USA
|-
| Chris Holmes
| [http://topp.openplans.org The Open Planning Project], [http://geoserver.org GeoServer]
| [http://incubator.osgeo.org Incubator], [http://board.osgeo.org Board], [http://geotools.org GeoTools]
| (40.72,-74.00)
| I come from the Java side of the OSGeo fence, getting my start in GeoServer, where I was lead developer for a couple years, and GeoTools, where I still serve on the PMC. My time is made possible by [http://topp.openplans.org The Open Planning Project (TOPP)], a great non-profit in New York that has been the lead supporter of GeoServer for years now. I spent the last year in Zambia on a Fulbright Scholarship, looking at the potential for open source software to help implement spatial data infrastructures in developing countries. It was a bit of a failure, but I learned a ton, and I see a lot of potential for open source in developing countries, towards truly open spatial data infrastructures. I'm back at TOPP, in a new role as VP of Strategic Development, helping to grow the organization, and figuring out how to make our geospatial stuff self sustaining. Once that's rolling, I hope to reinvest extra revenue in to figuring out and building a truly open geospatial web. And just like apache and linux are the bedrock that the World Wide Web rests on, so too do I believe that the geospatial web necessarily must be built on a foundation of OS Geo software. My continuing thoughts on all of this can be found at http://cholmes.wordpress.com
|-
| Michael P. Gerlek
| [http://www.lizardtech.com LizardTech]
| [http://visibilitycommittee.osgeo.org Promotion and Visibility Committee] (chair)
| (47.673166,-122.530143)
| Manager of LizardTech's Engineering department, where we do MrSID and JPEG 2000 stuff and play with with the next generation of technologies for supporting raster data GIS workflows. No, our products are not open source -- but we do very much support and use open source and open standards. (I think there is room in the world for both the open and closed development models, and I have a strong interest in helping "closed" companies understand the value of, and contribute to, the open software world.) [[User:mpg]]
|-
| Frank Warmerdam
| Independent
| [http://www.gdal.org GDAL/OGR], [http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu MapServer], [http://incubator.osgeo.org Incubator], [http://board.osgeo.org Board]
| (45.45,-77.25)
| Lead developer of GDAL/OGR and freelance geospatial software developer.
|-
| Jason Birch
| [http://www.nanaimo.ca/ City of Nanaimo]
| [http://webcommittee.osgeo.org Web Site], [http://visibilitycommittee.osgeo.org Promotion & Visibility]
| (49.155, -124.005)
| I am a long-time GIS/IT/'Net junkie, and am currently working for the City of Nanaimo's IT department as a Sr. Applications Analyst (GIS Specialist). I am excited about what I see happening in the open source geospatial world, with OSGeo as a catalyst. [[User:Jasonbirch]]
|-
|Howard Butler
| [http://www.hobu.biz/ Hobu, Inc]
| [http://webcommittee.osgeo.org Web Site Committee],
| (42.00, -93.00)
| MapServer hacker, MTSC member. GDAL hacker. ESRI ArcSDE hack. Purveyor of Windows binary builds [[User:hobu]]
|-
| Markus Neteler
| [http://mpa.itc.it ITC-irst], [http://www.cealp.it CEA], [http://www.gdf-hannover.de GDF Hannover]
| [http://grass.itc.it GRASS GIS], [http://board.osgeo.org Board], [http://geodata.osgeo.org Public Geodata Com.], [http://edu.osgeo.org Education Com.], [http://visibilitycommittee.osgeo.org Promotion & Visibility Com.]
| (46.06714, 11.15113)
| Developer of GRASS GIS, researcher at ITC-irst + CEA, Trento, Italy and co-founder of GDF Hannover [[User:neteler]]
|-
| R. Paul Warriner
| [http://www.orchardparkny.org/ Town of Orchard Park]
| [http://fundraising.osgeo.org Fundraising Committee], [http://webcommittee.osgeo.org Web Site Committee]
| (43.17, -78.69)
| Network Coordinator, old oil field hand (really, I do know what a christmas tree is).
[[User:RPaulW]]
|-
|Bart van den Eijnden
| [http://www.osgis.nl/ OSGIS]
| [http://chameleon.maptools.org Chameleon],
| (52.0768396070808, 5.12454)
| Freelancer working with several open source GIS tools, mainly Chameleon, Mapserver and Geoserver.
[[User:bartvde]]
|-
|Simone Giannecchini
| [http://simboss.wordpress.com/ blog] ,[http://www.geo-solutions.it GeoSolutions]
| [http://geoserver.org GeoServer], [http://http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/Home GeoTools]
| (gotta look for it :-))
| I have been working as a freelance consultant in the GIS and Image Processing field since early 2004, mainly in scientific and military environment. I am PMC member of [http://http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/Home GeoTools] and active developer of [http://geoserver.org GeoServer]. I am also providing some patches for the [https://jai.dev.java.net/ JAI] and [https://jai-imageio.dev.java.net/ ImageIO] SUN libraries for image processing in Java.

I am a big GDAL fan, I have been involved in the last year in an effort for putting GDAL behind ImageIO
for widening the number of supported formats. The goal is to make this formats avalaible through GeoTools to the GeoServer. If you are interested in supporting or joining this effort, please, drop me a few lines at simone.giannecchini-at-geo-solutions.it or simboss1-at-gmail.com
[[User:simboss]]
|-
| Helena Mitasova
| [http://skagit.meas.ncsu.edu/~helena/ North Carolina State University]
| [http://grass.itc.it GRASS GIS], [http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Core_Curriculum_Project Curriculum project]
| (35.77, -78.69)
| Researcher at NCSU (geospatial technology, environmental modeling, sustainable development), Developer of GRASS GIS. [[User:Helena]]
|-
| Daniel Morissette
| [http://www.mapgears.com/ Mapgears]
| [http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/ MapServer], [http://www.gdal.org GDAL/OGR]
| (48.42, -71.04)
| Involved in MapServer, GDAL/OGR and most [http://maptools.org/ MapTools.org] projects, mostly around webmapping and data access and distribution. [[User:dmorissette]]
|-
| Tamas Szekeres
| [http://www.hmeirt.hu/ MoD ED Co.]
| [http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/ MapServer]
| (47.56, 19.08)
| M.Sc.El.Engineer, Head of Development Department, GPS Division , MapServer contributor/hacker, mapscript C# maintainer, involved in various WEB mapping and desktop applications, GPS navigation and tracking systems. [[User:szekerest]]
|-
| Ari Jolma
| [http://users.tkk.fi/~jolma/index.html TKK]
| [http://www.gdal.org GDAL/OGR], [http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Core_Curriculum_Project Curriculum project]
| (60° 16' , 24° 47' 4'')
| Professor at TKK, Finland (geoinformatics, environmental information systems, water resources systems), [http://map.hut.fi/PerlForGeoinformatics/ just another Perl hacker] [[User:ajolma]]
|-
| Jeff McKenna
| [http://www.dmsolutions.ca DM Solutions Group]
| [http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/ MapServer]
| (45.401397610, -75.725861625)
| MapServer documentation, [http://www.maptools/ms4w MS4W] maintainer, [http://www.maptools.org maptools] co-maintainer. [[User:jmckenna]]
|-
| Ian Turton
| [http://www.geovista.psu.edu/members/turton/index.html work][http://pennspace.blogspot.com/ blog]
| [http://www.geotools.org GeoTools]
| (40.7932, -77.847)
| [http://www.geotools.org GeoTools] founder and developer, [http://www.geovistastudio.psu.edu GeoVistaStudio] benevolent dictator, [http://geoserver.org GeoServer] user. [[User:ianturton]]
|-
| David Blasby
| [http://topp.openplans.org The Open Planning Project], [http://geoserver.org GeoServer], [http://geotools.org GeoTools]
| [http://geotools.org GeoTools]
| (varies)
| Currently, I'm the Project Lead for Geoserver and am on the GeoTools Project Management Committee. I'm just starting a GeoWiki (Public Participation GIS) (please contact me if you're interested). I was the orginal creator of PostGIS, and have contributed to several OS GIS projects, including JTS, JUMP, and Mapserver.
|-
| Andrey Kiselev
| "Radar" R&D Centre (Russia)
| GDAL/OGR
| (60.04,30.33)
| Freelance developer and contributor to GDAL/OGR project.
|-
| Helton Uchoa
| [http://www.geolivre.org.br Geolivre Community], [http://www.open3dgis.org Open 3D GIS Project]
| [http://webcommittee.osgeo.org Web Site Committee] and [http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Public_Geospatial_Data_Project Public Geospatial Data Project]
| (-22.96, -43.11)
| I'm a Geomatics Enginner and I work at [http://www.opengeo.com.br OpenGEO Company] as a GIS Specialist. I'm responsible for many GIS projects using FOSS and the OpenGIS Specifications in Brazil and I have some relevant papers and scientific articles presented in Brazilian and Latin-American conferences and published in scientific magazines. In last year, I have helped, as a teacher, introduce the GNU/FSF philosophy at the Transportation Engineering Department of IME ([http://www.ime.eb.br Military Institute of Engineering - IME], Brazil). I have worked in Geolivre Rio 2004 and 2005 as member of organization commitee. Now I'm working in [http://www.geolivre.org Geolivre Conference 2007]. [[User:Uchoa]]
|-
| Toru Mori
| [http://www.orkney.co.jp/english Orkney, Inc.]
| [http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/ MapServer], [http://grass.itc.it GRASS GIS]
| (35.448, 139.642)
| President of Orkney, Inc. Advocate of Open Geospatial tools in Japan and Asia. Promote open geospatial data. [[User:moritoru]]
|-
| Allan Doyle
| [http://www.eogeo.org EOGEO],[http://museum.mit.edu/cmp MIT Museum],[http://spg.gsfc.nasa.gov/ NASA Earth Science Data Systems Standards Process Group]
| [http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Public_Geospatial_Data_Project Public Geospatial Data Project]
| (42.28, -71.24)
| President of [http://www.eogeo.org EOGEO] and [http://www.intl-interfaces.com International Interfaces], long-time geo-interoperability interests, opensourced (is that a verb?) [http://openmap.bbn.com OpenMap], originator of OGC testbed idea, Web Mapping Testbed, WMS spec editor, worked on WMS Context, [http://www.georss.org GeoRSS]. [http://www.eogeo.org/Members/adoyle more details]. [http://think.random-stuff.org Blog][[User:adoyle]]
|-
| Ned Horning
| [http://cbc.amnh.org/ Center for Biodiversity and Conservation], [http://www.amnh.org/ American Museum of Natural History]
| [http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Core_Curriculum_Project Curriculum project]
|(43.9933, -73.0407)
|Program manager for [http://geospatial.amnh.org/ remote sensing/GIS]. Promoter of open source geospatial tools in the global conservation community.
|-
| Paul Spencer
| [http://www.dmsolutions.ca DM Solutions Group]
| [http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/ MapServer], [http://chameleon.maptools.org Chameleon], [http://ka-map.maptools.org kaMap], [http://maptools.org/maplab/index.phtml MapLab], [http://maptools.org/ms4w/index.phtml MS4W], [http://openev.sourceforge.net/ OpenEV]
| (45.401397610, -75.725861625)
| CTO of DM Solutions Group, designer/developer/contributor to many open source packages, especially based on MapServer. Recent interest/focus is on AJAX clients for mapping applications. [[User:pagameba]]
|-
| Mark Lucas
| remotesensing.org
| [http://www.remotesensing.org remotesensing.org] and [http://www.ossim.org ossim]
| (27.9690219N, 080.5590534W altitude sea level + 5m)
| CTO, original founder of ImageLinks and remotesensing.org. Board of Directors [http://www.oss-institute.org/ Open Source Software Institute] and the [http://www.ncospr.org/ National Center for Open Source Policy and Research]. Member of [http://www.opentechdev.org Open Technology Development] Tiger team for the Department of Defense (USA). Lead a team of talented developers on the OSSIM and [http://www.ossim.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=3 osgPlanet] projects. Previously spent 22 years in the United States Air Force and [http://www.nro.gov/ National Reconnaissance Office] and the [http://www.fas.org/irp/nro/hall3.htm Secretary of the Air Force Special Projects] organization working with various classified programs. Prior to Radiant Blue Technologies, was a Lead Scientist for Intelligence Data Systems, Titan Corporation, and L3-Communciations. [http://web.mac.com/mlucas17/iWeb/Site/Welcome.html Personal Web site]. [[User:mlucas17]]
|-
| Jo Walsh
| [http://okfn.org/geo/ Open Knowledge Foundation],[http://mappinghacks.com/ Mapping Hacks], [http://publicgeodata.org Public Geodata]
| Open Geodata committee
| (42.368297,-71.108696)
| Came to geospatial software through collaborative mapping on the semantic web work. Organising events to get geospatial hackers together with data-creating people and promote public access to state collected geodata. If you are in Europe please see [http://publicgeodata.org Public Geodata] and consider writing to an MEP about public domain data and "intellectual property rights" issues. If you collect GPS tracks, please consider uploading them to [http://openstreetmap.org/ OpenStreetmap] - my only real contribution to this project is to talk about it a lot. I co-wrote "Mapping Hacks" with Schuyler Erle and Rich Gibson, with a lot of contributions from OSGeo type of people. Last year wrote a lot of software using OSM and [http://openguides.org/ OpenGuides] with [[Mapserver]] to provide a basis for collaborative local "portal" type services on community wireless networks. Now more interested in doing collaborative writing and research projects. [[User:JoWalsh]]
|-
| Dave McIlhagga
| [http://www.dmsolutions.ca DM Solutions Group]
| [http://visibilitycommittee.osgeo.org Promotion and Visibility Committee]
| (45.401397610, -75.725861625)
| President & CEO of DM Solutions Group. Active promoter of open source geospatial technologies. Led DM Solutions Group to become a major contributor and advocate of MapServer and development of key open source MapServer utilities including [http://chameleon.maptools.org Chameleon], [http://ka-map.maptools.org kaMap], [http://maptools.org/maplab/index.phtml MapLab], [http://maptools.org/ms4w/index.phtml MS4W]. Provided financial and resource support for setup of a key home for open source geospatial projects at [http://www.maptools.org MapTools]. Led the organizing committee for [http://www.omsug.ca/osgis2004/index.html OSGIS], the first Open Source Geospatial conference in North America which coincided with the second MapServer User Meeting. Spearheaded the integration of the two major open source geospatial conferences from North America and Europe/Asia, as the [http://www.foss4g2006.org/ Free and Open Source Software for Geoinformations] single international event to be held in Lausanne Switzerland. [[User:davemac]]
|-
| Pericles (Perry) Nacionales
| [http://land.umn.edu University of Minnesota]
| [http://webcommittee.osgeo.org Web Site Committee]
| (44.9873167, -93.1851500)
| Promoter of open source geospatial technologies specially in the field of natural resources management and conservation, advocate of open and interoperability standards, MTSC member, author of [http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/tutorial/tutorial/tutorial MapServer Tutorial].
|-
| Norman Vine
| Independent
|
| (41:31:38N, 70:39:43W)
| Independent software developer [[User:Nhv]]
|-
| Mike Adair
| [http://www.geoconnections.org/CGDI.cfm Natural Resources Canada/GeoConnections]
| [http://communitymapbuilder.org MapBuilder]
| (45.27, -75.75)
| Contributor and member of MapBuilder PMC. Interested primarily in AJAX client technology for mapping, but also in the whole SDI stack. [[User:madair]]
|-
| Stefan F. Keller
| University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil (HSR), [http://www.ifs.hsr.ch Institute for Software]
| [http://webgis.hsr.ch/javawps JavaWPS]
| (47.2240, 8.8181)
| Promotor of open source and commercial technologies specially in the field of information retrieval, databases, GIS and visualization. Advocate of open and interoperability standards, member of national GIS standardization (e-geo, SNV) and umbrella (SOGI) organizations. Creator of [http://wwww.geometa.info geometa.info], one of the first search engines for geospatial services (WMS), metadata and online maps (Lucene-based); contributor of geo-webservices for german Wikipedia. [[User:Sfkeller]]
|-
| [[User:Arnulf Christl | Arnulf Christl]]
| [http://www.wheregroup.com WhereGroup], [http://www.opengeospatial.org OGC Member]
| [http://www.mapbender.org Mapbender], [http://www.fossgis.de FOSSGIS], [http://board.osgeo.org Board], [[Promotion and Visibility Committee]]
| (50.7342N, 7.0707W)
| Mapbender PSC, [http://www.gnu.org Free] and [http://www.opensource.org Open] Source Software [[Business]] advocate on a mission to reduce [[FOSSFUD]].
|-
|V.RaviKumar
|Geologist
|OSGeo member [http://freegis.gnu.org.in/grass_geosciencedataset.pdf],[''GRASS Indian exmple'']
| 17° N 79° E
| A Geologist from India who is interested in FOSS software. GRASS in particular. Conducted a FOSS workshop at Hyderabad, India in May 2005. The workshop boosted our spirits with a large participation and good articles on various FOSS software. An entire session was for GRASS, Qgis software. Presently lecturing in various forums on the capability of GRASS and allied FOSS GIS. With the help of Free Software Foundation India, trying to spread awareness of GRASS GIS, GNU-Linux and FOSS. Countries like India have a lot to gain with the spread of FOSS.
|-
|David Hastings
|UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, Bangkok
|Member of original Grass Interagency Steering Committee, etc.
| 13.75°N 100.5°E
| A physicist/geophysicist/geological engineer who has used GRASS since 1987, and on the GRASS Interagency Steering Committee for the original public-domain package. I wrote the Linux Mini-HOWTO on GRASS-GIS (which is now woefully out of date); and taught short courses in scientific (as opposed to cartographic) GIS since 1980. In 1994 I moved my teaching to the Web, developing the CyberInstitute Short-Course on GIS. Currently, I'm at UN ESCAP. Open-Source is a great capacity- building environment for software communities worldwide. In developing countries, rather than being stuck merely teaching people to cut and paste stuff within a proprietary office suite, you can be part of the full development team, customizing the software to your community's needs, helping your country to have its own software development community - and hopefully making a satisfying living in the process.
|-
| Gary Sherman
| [http://mrcc.com Micro Resources], [http://qgis.org Quantum GIS]
| OSGeo Member
| (-149.567, 61.32138)
| Consultant, "Father" of Quantum GIS, long-time Linux user and Open Source proponent.
|-
| Astrid Emde
| [http://www.mapbender.org Mapbender], MapServer, PostgreSQL/PostGIS
| Mapbender Development
| (7.0707, 50.7342)
| Projects with MapServer, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, Mapbender. Part of the Mapbender Developer Team. Courses for Mapbender, UMN MapServer, PostgreSQL/PostGIS and WMS, WFS
|-
| Jeroen Ticheler
| [http://geonetwork-opensource.org GeoNetwork opensource], [http://sourceforge.net/projects/intermap InterMap opensource], [http://www.fao.org/geonetwork Food and Agriculture Organization GeoNetwork]
| OSGeo member, [http://www.osgeo.org/geonetwork GeoNetwork]
| 42.07420°N, 12.34343°E
| I've initiated the development of the GeoNetwork opensource Spatial Data Catalog software and its embedded InterMap opensource Map Viewer. I hope to contribute possitively to the creation of a comprehensive, FOSS based toolkit for Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) that help people share and use geospatial data and information in an easy and cost effective way. I focus especially on the data sharing within the United Nations system and in countries under development. I promote free and open source software as an excellent option for more sustainable development in these countries, proving it works by applying and further developing it in my day to day work. [http://lists.eogeo.org/mailman/listinfo/opensdi OpenSDI] is a forum to discuss foss and cots integration.
|-
| Dirceu Machado
| [http://www.pti.org.br Itaipu Tecnology Park]
| OSGeo member,GRASS
| 59°S, -24°E
| I'm a brazilian developer of open source GIS/WEB_GIS applications using PHP, JAVA and Python with Mapserver and PostGIS and also a user and enthusiast of Linux and BSD's OS. I'm excited with the idea of a community like this one and i wish to help in any way i can with development's (if necessary) and/or documentation translations to portuguese language. Actualy i'm working in a project to develop a GIS viewer and map generator (for printing purposes) in Python based on the idea of the JUMP Project.
|-
| Kevin Yam
| [http://www.ene.gov.on.ca Ontario Ministry of the Environment], [http://www.lio.mnr.gov.on.ca, Land Information Ontario]
| OSGeo member
| 43.709, -79.544
| Program coordinator for information management within the Provinicial Ministry of the Environment. I focus especially on data sharing between government agencies, departments and local stakeholders, and I am a promoter of open source geospatial tools applicable to environmental monitoring and observing [[User:kevinyam]]
|-
| Colin Gowens
| Geographer, GIS Professional
| OSGeo member
| 33.7518, -84.3920
| User of GRASS, GDAL, OGR, PostGIS and Mapserver since 2002. The open source GIS software and community have proven tremendously valuable to my GIS endeavors.
|-
| David Bitner
| [http://maps.macnoise.com/interactive/ Metropolitan Airports Commission], [http://dbspatial.com/ dbSpatial]
| OSGeo member, Geodata Committee
| 44.844, -93.560
| Active PostGIS and MapServer user. GIS application developer for airport authority and other freelance projects. Serve on Regional/State committees (Minnesota) for Data Sharing and Enterprise Geospatial Architecture. Member of Twin Cities Mapserver Users Group.
|-
| Tyler Mitchell
| [http://spatialguru.com, Spatialguru.com]
| OSGeo Executive Director, [http://visibilitycommittee.osgeo.org Promotion and Visibility Committee], [http://edu.osgeo.org Education Committee]
| 52.13, -121.13 (lat/lon)
| MapServer, PostGIS, GRASS, GDAL user. [http://oreilly.com/catalog/webmapping, O'Reilly Author], writer, promoter of Open Source GIS.
|-
| Rafael Medeiros Sperb
| [http://www.univali.br, G10 - UNIVALI]
| OSGeo Member
| -26.60, -48.70 (lat/lon)
|-
| Steven M. Ottens
| [http://www.geodan.com/ Geodan]
| [http://communitymapbuilder.org MapBuilder]
| 52.34, 4.91 (lat/lon)
| Contributor and member of MapBuilder PMC. [[User:stvn]]
|-
| Stefano Maffulli
| Politecnico di Milano
| [http://visibilitycommittee.osgeo.org Promotion and Visibility Committee], [http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/International_Outreach International Outreach], [http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Public_Geospatial_Data_Project Public Geospatial Data]
| 45, 9 (Lat,Lon)
| Architect, worked within the GIS_Lab at University of Florence on research about sustainable development of historical cities. At Joint Research Center (Ispra) worked within the EU funded project [http://commongis.org CommonGIS]. Currently working with Politecnico di Milano as consultant on [http://www.corila.it/ Methodologies and technologies for conservation and restoration of historical Venetian buildings]
|-
| Dave Patton
| [http://members.shaw.ca/davepatton/ CIS Canadian Information Systems]
| helping the Website Committee
| 49.27N 123.15W
| Self-employed computer consultant. Co-lead developer for [http://punt.sourceforge.net/ Punt], an Open Source multi-language Windows desktop application that allows the user to view the terrain of any world in 3D. Canadian Coordinator and co-administrator of [http://www.confluence.org/index.php the Degree Confluence Project] [[User:Dpatton]]
|-
| Jody Garnett<br>[[User:Jive]]
| [http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/Home GeoTools]
| Iccubation and limited Website Committee
| missing
| It seems all I do is email, must be due to [http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/Home GeoTools], [http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOS/Home GeoServer], [http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEO/Home GeoAPI] and [http://udig.refractions.net uDig]. I am working at [http://www.refractions.net/ Refractions Research, Inc], a small consulting company with an open source habit.
|-
| Justin Deoliveira
| [http://topp.openplans.org The Open Planning Project], [http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/Home GeoTools], [http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOS/Home GeoServer]
| [http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/Home GeoTools]
| undeterministic
| [http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/Home GeoTools] module maintainer, [http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOS/Home GeoServer] developer, and [http://udig.refractions.net uDig] committer. I have been kicking around the Java GIS world for approximately 3 years contributing as an active developer on said projects. For the last year or so I have been working for a non-profit company known as [http://topp.openplans.org The Open Planning Project].
|
|-
| Dylan Beaudette
| [http://casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/drupal/node/38 UCD]
| GRASS
| Input lat/long here
| Soils and Biogeochemistry M.S. student at University of California, Davis. Interested in the use and proliferation of OSS in the sciences, particularly soil science. GIS and geomorphologic analysis; presentation of USDA-NCSS digital soil survey information / soils education through visual example.
|-
| Stuart Eve
| [http://www.lparchaeology.com L - P : Archaeology]
| Mapserver (user), GRASS (user)
| Input lat/long here
| Involved in using web-based Open Source technologies to make archaeological data accessible to a wider audience. We use Mapserver in a number of applications, including [http://www.fastionline.org Fasti Online]
|-
| [[User:Pmarc | Paulo Marcondes]]
| [http://www.marcondes.org marcondes.org], [http://hamstuff.blogspot.com Blog]
| [http://grass.itc.it GRASS] (translator), OSGeo Member (?), [[Brasil | OSGeo Brasil]] (proponent)
| (-22.915,-42.229), Maidenhead: GG87vc
| Working in the GRASS translation to portuguese (pt_br), somewhat involved (at least intelecutally) with Debian-GIS, involved in the local Debian User Group. My interests range from everything spatial to everything geospatial, GIS, GPS, Ham Radio, wardriving, etc. I have a B.S. in Geology (2001) Universidade de São Paulo, Brasil. I do R&D in the oil industry in a non GIS arena, but plan migrating to the GIS arena in the near future. I'm also planning a M.S. in GIS sometime in the future (accepting suggestions).
I would like to see free software adopted everywhere. I don't dislike proprietary software per se, but the attitude it usually inspires.
|-
| [[User:anselm | Anselm Hook]]
| [http://hook.org hook.org], [http://maps.civicactions.net maps.civicactions.net] [http://placedb.org placedb]
|
| (-122.673,-45.5371), Portland Oregon
| Both commercial and open source developer. Led engineering for platial.com and wrote placedb.org - also wrote maps.civicactions.net (an ajax tile map engine with a dataset behind it). Also wrote a small java spinny globe at [http://hook.org/headmap headmap]. Interested in providing fully open source map data (not simply applications or tools but actual content). Primarily interested in social and environmental issues with an eye towards modelling near term outcomes of decision making.
|-
| Oscar Cantán
| University of Zaragoza, Spain
| Member
| (41.666,-0.888)
| Currently working on the development and implementation of geospatial interoperability standards. Specially interested in OGC catalog services specification (CSW, SRW) and metadata content standards (ISO 19119-19139).
|-
| Lorenzo Becchi
| http://www.ominiverdi.org
| OSGeo Member
| moving
| ka-Map developer. User:[[User:Ominiverdi|Ominiverdi]]
|-
| Christoph Baudson
| http://www.mapbender.org
| OSGeo Member
| here, there and everywhere
| Mapbender developer. See [[User:christoph|Christoph]]
|-
| Georg Lösel
| http://www.grass-verein.de GRASS-Anwender-Vereinigung
| User (GRASS, QGIS); Free Geodata
| 52,3625/9,7481
| [[User:Georgloesel|Georg Lösel]]
|-
| Reinhard Simon
| [http://www.cipotato.org [International Potato Center, Lima, Peru]
| Project lead: [http://research.cip.cgiar.org/confluence/display/divagis/Home DIVA-GIS]
| NA
| [[User:rsimon|Reinhard Simon]]
|-
| Todd Jamison
| http://www.observera.com
| OSGEO Member; User: OSSIM, GDAL, MapServer; Contributor: OSSIM
| (38.898489, -77.500484)
| Chief Image Scientist and CEO of Observera, Inc. Observera worked on the original OSSIM library with ImageLinks and we have developed several projects using the OSSIM library and MapServer, including ALLEGRO (Land-cover / Land-use Classification) and the Change Detection WorkStation (CDWS), both for the US Army. Expertise includes spectral, thermal, microwave sensors, photogrammetry, image registration, image processing, morphology, resolution enhancement, workflow automation, machine learning (e.g., neural nets, support vector machines, genetic algorithms), Geologic GIS and bunches of other stuff. Glad to be a part of OSGEO.
|-
| Laurent Jégou
| [http://www.univ-tlse2.fr/geoprdc UTM Dept. Géo], [http://www.forumsig.org Forum SIG], [http://www.portailsig.org Portail SIG]
| User and wanabee [http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Core_Curriculum_Project Curriculum project] contributor.
| (43.6N, 1.4E)
| Cartographer (conception, production, integration), cartography and GIS teacher for masters degrees, open source mapping software developper (.Net and Java), technology developpement monitoring.
|-
| Hardeep Singh Rai
| [http://www.gndec.ac.in/ Guru Nanak Dev Engineering College, Ludhiana, Punjab]
| -
| (30.55N,75.54E)
| Willing to see growth of GPL/OpenSource softwares in every field. Civil Engineer, in teaching profession since 1989. Presently Professor and Head of Civil Engineering Department.
|-
| Paolo Cavallini
| [http://www.faunalia.it Faunalia]
|
|
|
|-
| M. Agus Salim
| [http://gislab.cifor.cgiar.org/fsic Forest Spatial Information Catalog]
| User
| Bogor, Indonesia [106.752E,6.5533S]
| Working as GIS Assistant in Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). Currently i am interested in exploring geospatial open source software capabilities and hope to involved more than a user in the future
|-
| Janusz Michalak
| [http://www.ptip.org.pl/ Polish Association for Spatial Information]
[http://netgis.geo.uw.edu.pl/ Warsaw University, Dept. of Geology]
| GRASS user
| Warsaw, Poland (52.2118,20.9864)
| Will be added later
|-
| Chris Tweedie
| [http://www.dli.wa.gov.au/ Dept. of Land Information]
| OSGeo Lurker
| Perth, Australia [116.0043,-31.8869]
| Deploying a statewide SDI for WA using largely OSGeo projects. General lurker i'm afraid, lots of ideas, not enough time~
|-
| The Sunburned Surveyor (A.K.A. - Landon Blake)
| [http://openjump.blogspot.com/index.html My Blog]
| OSGeo Lurker
| Stockton, California
| Project administrator and developer for The JUMP Pilot Project and the SurveyOS Project.
|-
| Rob Atkinson
| [http://online.socialchange.net.au]
| Geoserver PSC, Geotools
| Wollongong,Australia
| SDI Architect. Involved in data standards and tools to deploy them, registry design, standards development (mainly OGC and ISO, INSPIRE.) Generally, enabling Observations and Measurements patterns in OS tools and other consistency/productivity/scalability requirements.
|-
| Mateusz Loskot
| [http://mateusz.loskot.net/ http://mateusz.loskot.net]
| [http://www.gdal.org/ GDAL/OGR] hacker, [http://fdo.osgeo.org FDO] PSC and hacker, [http://wl.sggw.waw.pl/ Warsaw Agricultural University]
| Warsaw,Poland (52.2373 21.0834)
| A freelance geospatial software developer and contributor to various FOSS/GIS projects. Interested in [http://mobile.maptools.org/ mobile GIS solutions]. Active member of various Open Source Software communities. [[User:mloskot]]
|-
| Asif Ahmed
| http://www.on.ec.gc.ca/orise
| Osgeo Member
| Toronto, Canada
| Mapserver user, Chameleon user, Coldfusion, .NET, C and Perl experience. Open source enthusiast.
|-
|-
| Dongpo Deng
| [http://www.iis.sinica.edu.tw/~dongpo/cv.html About me]
| OSGeo Lurker
| Taipei, Taiwan(25.041N 121.614E)
| A researcher for open geospatial techniques and data.
|-
| Ian Ibbotson
| http://developer.k-int.com
| Osgeo Lurker
| Sheffield, UK (37.0625,-95.677068)
| Information Retrieval / Information Repository Developer. Worked with USGS on combining text and spatial IR systems, on the GEO Z3950 profile, and on exposing GEO access points in the SRW/SRU protocol. Developer on UK Peoples Network cultural heritage / digital preservation amongst other projects with public information / spatial faceted data.
|-
| Josef Assad
| Independent (for now)
| Still figuring out where I can be most useful as an OSGEO slave
| Cairo, Egypt (30.070877;31.220312)
| Free software, open standards are my primary areas of interest.
|-
| Ben Discoe
|
| [http://vterrain.org Virtual Terrain Project (VTP)]
| Ahualoa, Hawai'i (20.0532,-155.5085)
| After some years in the virtual reality field, i got the geospatial religion. With some support from Intel, i began what later grew into the VTP. 7 years after public launch, it is now a thriving community, educational website, and suite of open-source geovisualization software, which is likely to become an official OSGeo project at some point.
|-
| Emilio Mayorga
| [http://marine.rutgers.edu/BGC/ Rutgers], [http://garrobo.org/ CAEE]
|
| New Brunswick, New Jersey (40.505,-74.399)
| Post-doc researcher at Rutgers, working on [http://www.marine.rutgers.edu/globalnews/ global carbon and nutrients exports from rivers to the ocean], and very interested in pushing FOSS tools (geospatial and otherwise) and the open, community aspects surrounding them, into the Earth Sciences community. I'm doing more and more Python lately (and enjoying it), but previously have worked with Perl, C, the whole ESRI stack, Matlab, etc. In my recent, previous life, I was a lead GIS Analyst at a [http://www1.co.snohomish.wa.us/Departments/Public_Works/Divisions/SWM/ Washington state county]; that 5-year experience strongly colored my perspective and interests. I've also worked with [http://garrobo.org/ a small group compiling and redistributing environmental data (mostly geospatial) for Central America], where I've pushed a FOSSG stack (MapServer, GDAL, qgis). I hope to help out with the [http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Public_Geospatial_Data_Project Public Geospatial Data Project], focusing on scientific datasets, developing countries, and practical implementations. [[User:Emayorga]]
|-
| Aarti Singh
| Johns Hopkins - KGMU Collaborative Projects
| OSGeo Member
| Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India (26.55, 80.59)
| We're working on public health research and are using GIS tools to map our study area.
|-
| Dan Jacobson/積丹尼
| (none)
| [[Taiwan|Taiwan Chapter]] member
| Dongshi, Taiwan 120.87 E, 24.18 N
| House address planning, utility pole coordinates, bus routes. See http://jidanni.org/
|-
| Yves Jacolin
| [http://georezo.net GeoRezo moderator] for the Webmapping forum
| Francophone Local Chapter / OSGeo Member / GRASS, QGIS and MapServer User
| Suresnes, France (48.87N, 2.23E)
| Translate and write documentation or how-to about GDAL-ORG, QGIS, GRASS, MapServer, ... Help in georezo.net forumsig.org OS and webmapping forum. Work on the creation of the [[Francophone|francophone local chapter]].
|-
| [[User:Jsanz|Jorge Sanz]]
| [http://www.prodevelop.es Prodevelop], [http://www.gvsig.gva.es gvSIG project]<br/> [http://geomaticblog.net geomaticblog.net]
| OSGeo Member / [[Español|Spanish Local Chapter]]
| Valencia, Spain (40.396N,3.713W)
| I'm working as GIS developer and power user :P. Free software fan since 2000 and enthusiastic GNU/Linux user. I'm translating OSGeo portal pages.
|-
| [[User:MarkusLupp|Markus Lupp (Markus Müller)]]
| [http://www.deegree.org deegree], [http://www.lat-lon.de lat/lon]
| OSGeo member, editor of the Topical Studies secion of the OSGeo journal
| Hamburg, Germany (10.00, 52.74)
| I am one of the founding members and managers of the [http://www.deegree.org deegree] project. Besides this I am actively involved in the work of the [http://www.opengeospatial.org OGC], e.g. as editor of Symbology Encoding and SLD profile of WMS specifications. For OSGeo, I serve es editor for the Topical Studies section of the OSGeo journal.
|-
| Bob Bruce
| Handyside Web Programming Services [http://www.hwps.ca]
| MapServer, QGIS user, co-creator of the mapping interface for www.TheMuralsofWinnipeg.com [http://www.themuralsofwinnipeg.com/Mpages/indexMuralsMap.php]
| Winnipeg, Canada (49.86059N, 97.104989W)
| I am an advocate for open source geospatial software
|-
| [[User:milovanderlinden|Milo van der Linden]]
| CTO 3DSite IT&C bv, the Netherlands
| [http://www.3dsite.nl 3DSite]
| (51.516N,3.880E)
| BSc in Geo-science, 10 years experience in GIS. Started my own company in jan 2007. Focus on 3D GIS, Google Earth, Fleet management, Routing and Navigation. Open Sourcing with: MapWindow GIS, OpenStreetMap, OGR/GDAL, QuantumGIS, dotProject, Blender. Developer in VB6, VB.NET and C#
|-
| Kevin Flanders
| PeopleGIS Inc. [http://www.peoplegis.com]
| MapServer, home of MapsOnline...a municipal online mapping service
| Concord, MA USA (42.459N, 71.3518W)
| PeopleGIS has built MapsOnline and other related products on open source software for over five years, working with many people on this list.
|-
| [[User:AndrewTurner|Andrew Turner]]
| [http://highearthorbit.com HighEarthOrbit], [http://mapfacture.com Mapufacture]
| OSGeo Lurker
| Ann Arbor, MI, US (42.2774N x 83.7611W)
| [http://oreilly.com/catalog/neogeography Neogeographer] - interested in helping GIS be usable and creatable by non-geo-savvy users. Helps develop [http://mapstraction.com Mapstraction], and [http://georss.org/geopress GeoPress] web mapping and publishing tools. Active contributor to the [http://georss.org GeoRSS Community].
|-
| Wolf Bergenheim
| none. I'm a free OS coder
| GRASS as a developer and GSoC 2007 Mentor. PostGIS user
| 60.237N 24.823E (Espoo Finland)
| I'm an independend student of geoinformatics and OpenSource. Interested in developing GRASS and helping to add more features to the already rich feature set. I'm prepared to develop modules for GRASS on commission / request.
|-
| [[User:peterrushforth|Peter Rushforth]]
| [http://www.geoconnections.org Natural Resources Canada/GeoConnections]
| OGR user
| Ottawa, Ont, Canada
| Interested in GML / XSLT processing.
[[Category:Membership]]
|-
| [[User:percyd|David Percy]]
| [http://gisgeek.pdx.edu Portland State University Geology Department Geospatial Data Manager]
| FOSS4G 2007 Workshops Committee
| Portland, OR, USA (45.51238, -122.682500)
| Interested in web mapping and most things to do with GIS, databases, and networking, especially related to Earth Science. I work with a large portion of the geologic mapping community in the United States at the state and federal levels to bring geologic maps into some semblance of interoperability. This effort is also internationalized via the [http://www.bgs.ac.uk/cgi_web/ Commission for the Management and Application of Geoscience Information]. We use almost all open source GIS software for this effort. See the [http://ngmdb.usgs.gov National Geologic Map Database] for progress.
[[Category:Membership]]
|-
| [[User:lolostar|Laurent Pierre]]
| [Electricité de France R&D]
|
| Montrouge, 92, France (48.812, 2.317)
| Interested in web mapping, SVG, spatial databases.
[[Category:Membership]]
|-
| [[User:gfleming|Gavin Fleming]]
| [http://www.gissa.org.za/sig/opensource/open-source Geoinformation Society of South Africa FOSS SIG chair], [http://www.mintek.co.za Senior GISc and sustainable development researcher at Mintek]
| FOSS4G 2008 conference chair, OSGeo Africa Chapter chair
| Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa (-26.0896, 27.9782)
| I use and promote FOSS GIS for sustainable development and in particular in mining, environmental and related fields.
|-
| [[User:Smitch|Scott Mitchell]]
| Carleton University
| GRASS PSC, Ottawa Local Chapter, Education/Curriculum
| Ottawa, ON, Canada (45.381, -75.699)
| See my [[User:Smitch|user page]] for more information.
|-
| [[User:Mleslie|Mark Leslie]]
| LISAsoft
| MapServer, GeoTools
| Sydney, NSW, Australia (-33.864575,151.194353)
| Broad spectrum open source geospatial developer.
|-
| [[User:dhirner|Daniel Hirner]]
| [http://www.bc-ebc.ca BC Electoral Boundaries Commission]
| [http://www.bc-ebc.ca/proposed_smp Our site using Google Maps API]
| Vancouver, BC (49.260470,-123.113940)
| Production Manager (GIS)
|-
| Darryl Woodley
| [http://www.esquimalt.ca/ Township of Esquimalt]
| MapGuide 6.5 user
| | Victoria, BC (48.429984, -123.413500)
| I am the lead GIS person on staff for the Township of Esquimalt. We are currently running MapGuide 6.5 on our intranet only. I am not too involved in the nuts and bolts of our GIS as our staff level requires us to contract out most of the GIS work.

[[Category:Membership]]

Core Curriculum Project

2007-10-14T20:26:12Z

Wiki-Watry: /* Project Comments */

''This project might be renamed to "Educational & Curriculum" or "Educational Outreach" or "Learning Resources on GIS".''

The project is now officially approved as [[Education and Curriculum Committee]].

== Mission ==

The project aims at creating and promoting curriculum material that supports the goals of the Foundation. The intent is to provide material that is accessible by a broad audience including academia, professionals, and the general public. Material supported through this project should directly or indirectly build and strengthen the open source geospatial user and developer communities. This can be accomplished by integrating the use of OSGeo endorsed tools in curricula that teach geospatial concepts and applications as well as the creating curricula to teach skills necessary for people to actively participate in supported OSGeo software and data projects.

== Approach ==

The project is now officially approved as [[Education and Curriculum Committee]].

=== Database of educational material ===

I propose setting up an open database, where the person interested (teacher or somebody seeking education
for him/herself) makes some selections and is presented with a list of materials and links. There should be material for both preparing for the teaching/learning and for actually carrying out the teaching/learning. Material of the first type includes instructions to install software etc. thus there are links to tasks of other OSGeo projects. The data that describes the material should cover at least data needs, licencing, and (natural) language besides this information:

* type of education
* content of the education
* method of teaching/learning

==== type of education ====

* primary school (students are 7-12 years old)
* secondary school (students are 13-15 years old)
* high school (students are 16-18 years old)
* vocational college
* university, bachelor level (undergraduate)
* university, masters level (graduate)
* university, doctoral level (graduate)
* continuing education (students have a college or university degree and work experience)
* vocational education (students do not have a college or university degree but they have work experience)

==== content of the education ====

These could be divided into two main categories according
to main viewpoint: applied or core geoinformatics.

* a subject from trad. geosciences, not modeling
* a subject from trad. geosciences, involving modeling
* subject from application area, spatial planning
* subject from application area, development studies
* subject from application area, biology, ecology, etc.
* subject from application area, forestry
* subject from application area, civil engineering
* subject from application area, military
* subject from application area, rescue, etc.
* geospatial databases
* explorative geospatial visualization
* geospatial cartographic visualization
* geospatial algorithms
* geospatial statistics
* geospatial simulation
* development of geospatial information systems, analysis
* development of geospatial information systems, design
* development of geospatial information systems, actual development
* development of geospatial information systems, implementation
* development of geospatial information systems, evaluation
* geospatial software development, <insert language>
* geospatial software development, for desktop
* geospatial software development, for web, server side
* geospatial software development, for web, client side

==== method of teaching/learning ====

* lecture
* demonstration
* interactive workshop
* self-learning, reading
* self-learning, using software
* self-learning, project work

== Links to other OSGeo efforts ==

Since teaching GIS is related to GIS data, the collaboration with [http://geodata.osgeo.org Public Geospatial Data Committee] is desired, in particular with the [[Geodata Packaging Working Group]].

== Licensing of teaching material ==

The material developed here needs to be appropriately licensed.
[http://creativecommons.org Creative Commons] licenses come to mind. This will be worked out once the committee is established.

A key component related to this whole effort (related to incentive structures for some) will be how we maintain author attribution over time. This might be as simple as establishing in every document produced a "change log" listing who developed the initial document, and then listing who contributed to new derivative works. Also we need to decide whether we want a standard way of developing curricular material (e.g., wiki pages, open office writer documents, etc.) or if we accept any format, is the wiki set up to allow for the upload of files?

And do we want to try and agree on one open content license that allows for new derivative works or do we want to have a set identified depending on the author's interests? For example, someone might be willing to provide a tutorial but not want new derivative works, while others may be open to having new derivatives works produced from their submission. [Posted by Charlie Schweik]

== Comments ==

=== Comment on Wiki Communication Format ===
[[User:Arnulf Christl | I]] am very happy that this discussion did not yet dissolve into a mailing list. I strongly believe that we should try to keep it in Wiki-style as long as possible. It is a lot easier to get an overview of what is going on this way. For more specific and short term notices one(!) mailing list will be good for sure, but especially for longer term development this Wiki will be more valuable.

=== Project Comments ===

* Ned Horning's comments [[Some_comments|are here]].

* From Helena Mitasova
I read Ned comments - if you look at NCGIA Core Curriculum, it is very broad, so I suggest to keep at least the word Curriculum there (drop Core)--if we want to stress education in general, how about calling it Education and Curriculum Project. It would be great if we could build a curriculum that people who teach at universities and colleges could use to build OSGEO courses and programs (NCGIA curriculum linked in
the document is a good example). For example, if I had to teach geospatial analysis using GRASS, I am OK, but if I wanted to include a section about Mapserver a curriculum section prepared by somebody who has a lot of experience with it would be a great help.

* From Charlie Schweik
Since I am new to this group and have been introduced via my email address, for the group's information let me give you a short status on what I am up to. I am a faculty at University of Massachusetts, Amherst in the Department of Natural Resources Conservation. Right now I have two part-time students helping me develop some tutorials on Q-GIS. I have been teaching an Intro to GIS course for some time but am
relatively new to OS GIS products, so I'll be learning. I am planning on offering in April-May sessions to my students an overview to Q-GIS, and then some tutorials on fundamentals like georeferencing a scanned map, online digitizing, getting GPS data overlaid, etc. I see this as an entry point toward the use of GRASS. My ultimate goal over the next 6-8 months is to have some kind of distance learning material developed for use in an "Intro to OS GIS" online course offered out of my institution next Spring 2007. Having done research in Nepal for several years, part of my motivation for doing this was to help my colleagues there who desperately need GIS but face serious budgetary problems. I am not exactly sure how this will work under the context of my University's distance learning program. But I am a great proponent of open access and hope to use some kind of open content license (e.g., creativecommons.org) and see great value in helping move this project forward by contributing the material here to this broader educational effort. I need to see what kinds of requirements my university has related to material and an "official" online course that might get in the way of this vision. I had always envisioned making my material available somehow (e.g., MIT Open Courseware, FreeGIS.org, etc.) so the establishment of this OSGeo Curriculum and Education project is exciting to me. In short, I hope I can figure out how to use what I am doing to help this project and perhaps through this effort whatever we develop can be improved by the community here.

* From Ari Jolma

Concerning the curriculum and education project in general. I think we don't want to do something similar as NCGIA website, which, by the way, is not linked to any specific software as far as I see.

I try to be inpartial in my teaching, which is often difficult in this field and may lead to confusion on the students part sometimes on software issues. I also try to teach theory as opposed to practical use of software. So I have problems trying to figure out what is it that we should produce. I think tutorials like Gary's are good. Another good idea could be complete worked out examples, which the students can re-do, perhaps on their own time (distance learning) or without too much tutoring in a computer classroom. I've done a few like that (for example non-point source modeling and travel time analysis) but they still need quite a lot of tutoring. One problem I have is that as the software develops so fast (and I've used mostly my own..) the procedure changes slightly from year to year.

Using free tools in distance learning is really good because students can freely install their own copies of the software. On the other hand, for example my software is currently Linux-only, so it is not practical with many people. => There's a common interest with the OSGeo project creating installation packages.

I'd like to have some sort of timetable and agreed ways of working: mostly email or mostly wiki?

* From Helena Mitasova (in response to Charlie)
My idea in that respect was to use it to outline what to teach in different units (that is what NCGIA does) and then link to it a material that shows how to do it in a specific software using selected data. So for example we can have a unit on DEMs and topographic analysis
- the Curriculum will outline what is included under that unit and that can then be linked to several materials:
- general theory including equations and algorithms (this can be just a link to a relevant chapter in FreeGISBook)
- teaching material for use with GRASS
- teaching material for use with SAGA
- whatever else will people contribute to support this unit.

In this way we can minimize redundancy, cover number of different software packages and it will have an additional benefit that you can compare and see what would be the best for the class - e.g. topoanalysis in one package maybe more suited for natural resources students a different one would be better for computer science.

* From Prof. Venkatesh Raghavan
I think Curriculum, Education and Capacity Building initiatives
related to OSGEO could be broken down to three (or more) phases

;Phase 1 Short term (six months)
:a) Assimilation of existing tutorial, lecture notes, training documents, presentations that are available or could be made available under Open Document or Creative Commons License.

:b) Discuss how Curriculum can be structured with existing resources. Identify gaps for developing new material.

;Phase 2 Medium term (one year)
:a) Setup a e-learning portal (www.moodle.org) to manage existing course material and obtain user feedback. Have been experimenting with Moodle recently and we are trying to put together a online training course based on some of the material that we developed earlier. Could help with hosting a Moodle site if necessary (http://wgrass.media.osaka-cu.ac.jp/elearn/)

:b) Develop multi-media contents (animations, screen casting), data set for tutorial etc to facilitate self-learning.

;Phase 3 Long term (two three years)

:a) Develop standardized mechanism for testing (question banks, quiz, assignments etc). Moodle is quite good for this purpose

:b) Translation to local language and collection of datasets for geographic locations some language locales. Working with datasets that the candidate is familiar with can make learning easier.

:c) Initial review and improvement of contents and possible establishment of OSGEO Virtual University to cater to education, testing and certification of OSGEO Engineer.

* From Prof. Venkatesh Raghavan
We had discussed issues about Accredited Professional training before, I reproduce some of the thoughts below.
An OSGEO-CE (OSGEO- Certified Engineer), something in the lines of, PostgreSQL-CE, RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer). Having a OSGEO with tie-ups to some Universities,Academic societies, Industry, that could

a) design and market courseware and educational material
b) assure quality
c) provide accreditation to institutions that will start the course and also training to instructors at such institutes.
d) Evolve standardized mechanism for testing and certificate of candidates
c) Issue acrredited certification to successful candidates and provide placement counseling.

I think there is a market for such packaged educational and career solutions at least in Asia. I know of at least a few institutes in Aiaa that have been set-up during the last two years and have successfully (at least in term of candidate intake, the course content leaves a lot to be desired) implemented similar business model for proprietary Geoinfomrtics solutions.

Among numerous benefits that such a initiative would bring about, the one most important would be that it would help generate a pool of qualified professionals and developer who could in turn enrich the OSGEO Community.

Some additional thoughts and info about Professional Certification for OSGEO

a) A Japanese company started a Professional certification for PostgreSQL since 1st March 2005.
Details about the Certification are available at http://osb.sra.co.jp/postgresqlce/about_en.html
The testing is managed by Pearson VUE(http://www.vue.com/).
Details are available at http://www.vue.com/sra/ As per http://osb.sra.co.jp/postgresql-ce/news_en.html#20050224

b)Linux Professional Certification (http://www.lpi.org/en/home.html) offers accredited training and conducts training thru LPI approved training center the worldover. Candidates can register to take LPI exams at Pearson VUE testing centres worldwide(http://www.vue.com/) and Thomson Prometric (http://securereg3.prometric.com/Welcome.aspx) "LPI holds special exam labs at major Linux and IT tradeshows and conferences around the world, often offering LPI certification exams for substantially reduced pricing or in some cases free of cost."

c) Bradford Learning (http://www.bradfordlearning.com/en/start_page.php)
also offers LPI certification apart from various others including
apache, samba, mysql etc.

d) Some other listed as LPI sponsors (http://www.lpi.org/en/sponsors.html) also offer/manage Professional certification

* From David Hastings

I wonder if existing core curricula could be considered as relatively adequate (unless a further assessment determines otherwise). On the other hand, educational/training support for OSS has generally received bad press - and this group could help make considerable progress on that front.

I don't fully agree with the bad press about OSS support. Indeed, I seem to remember that Info World gave Red Hat Linux an award several years back for its support services - partly to counter that bad press. I personally found extensive support when I first used GRASS (in 1987), first became a GRASS system manager (in 1988), first installed Linux and put GRASS on my first dual-boot PC (in 1994), first stumbled across file-level interoperability between two GISs (1995, between GRASS and Idrisi byte data files), etc. Much support has been virtual, through searches of discussion group archives.

Nevertheless, training support for OSS GIS could be stronger. I think this could be the greatest challenge, and opportunity, in the educational arena for an Open-Source Geospatial Foundation.

My attempt to answer this during 1994-2002 was the CyberInstitute Short-Course in GIS, which ran additionally until sometime last year, 3 years after I departed Boulder for Bangkok and the UN. I think that such a general approach, strengthened by the ideas and circumstances of this Foundation, could be a useful piece in the puzzle of OSS educational/training support.

Implementation of something like the CyberInstitute Short-Course could be part of Venka's outline item 1b in his discussion on implementation phases (2 discussions above this one). I'd suggest that the name (CyberInstitute Short-Course) be considered for continuation, as it gained a bit of respect over the decade-plus that it ran on the NOAA/NGDC Website.

Please see my additional comments on the discussion page.

* From Venkatesh Raghavan

a) What are the objectives of the Core Curriculum?

The main focus would be on providing a solid foundation on Geoinformatics technology using OSGEO tools as a means of education and self-learning.

b) Who will be the actual customer to adopt the core curriculum would it be the institution or organisation which would ultimately employ our graduates?

We can think of regular and corporate sponsored training. Also focus on tailor-made courses. Direct marketing to potential clients would require lot of efforts. Maybe we need to think of providing packaged educational solutions (franchising) to institutions and universities.

c) Which kind of institutions/companies would employ OSGEO Prodessionals?

Geoinformatics industry, Government Institutions, NPO, NGO, Self-employed, Geo-contents service providers etc.

d) What would be the entry strategy? Will it be with high end courses or low end courses – i.e. in terms of pricing, content, etc?

We have to see what is presently available and at what cost. Most of info available from Google Search are summarized at http://www.institute.redlands.edu/kemp/certificates.html#Related. Details of two institutions presently offering courses in India are http://www.gisinstitute.net/upcoming.asp?id=27 http://www.mapmiddleeast.org/2006/conference/training.htm and http://www.symbiosis.ac.in/sig/course.htm. One example from Thailand is available at http://www.gac.ait.ac.th/training/catalog.php. Pricing info at these sites could be serve as reference in the Asian context. The course contents have to be decided after more discussions. I think the course should be modular introduced in a phased manner 6-8 weeks

Level 1: Introduction to GIS and Web Mapping Technologies: Basically how to install, use, producing maps using OSGEO tools. Completion of this level could result in certification as “XXXYYY Certified Application User”

Level 2: Geo-spatial Database Development: Open data standards, GML, Remote Sensing, GPS, mobile GIS, RDBMS. Completion of this level could result in certification as “XXXYYY Certified Spatial Database Manager”

Level 3: Advanced Module for Application Developers: Spatial data analysis using GRASS, Web GIS application development,using Mapserver Script languages, PHP, Javascript, Python. Completion of this level could result in certification as “XXXYYY Certified Application Developer”

Level 4: Advanced Module for Software Developers Developing Geoinformatics software and cross-platform GIS solutions e.g. GRASS Programing & Libraries, Data Exchange Libraries, C programming, Qt, Python, Plug-in development for QGIS. Software packaging (RPM etc.) Completion of this level will result in certification as “XXXYYY Certified Geoinfromatics Engineer”

Option to get a Master degree after completion for 4 Levels and conducting project research (in 16 to 18 weeks) could also be considered at a later stage.

* From [[User:Arnulf Christl | Arnulf Christl]]
The [[WhereGroup]] offers professional [http://www.wheregroup.com/en/training Training Services] for the FOSSGIS web services SDI stack that most of our customers need. It includes OSGeo software (Mapbender, MapServer, Quantum GIS, GDAL) and associated packages (GeoServer and PostGIS). This set of courses is designed to convey all information required to professionally operate an SDI stack most efficiently in a short period of time. Courses aim at professionals with previous knowledge in GIS, WebGIS and productive systems operation. This type of course differs from longer term learning followed by universities. The course material is currently published under several licenses at several places. The WhereGroup is in the process of homogenizing licenses and transferring course material and infrastructure to the OSGeo infrastructure. The first bits are already available at http://test.osgeo.net/moodle (Mapbender Introduction). All material can be used in any context including commercial use (for individual terms of use check the corresponding dual license CreativeCommons 2.0, GNU FDL).

* From [[User:Pnaciona | Perry Nacionales]]
I tend to agree with both Arnulf and Prof. Raghavan in that we have two general kinds of audience--those who are in "formal" academia and those who are already in the professional fields trying to expand their knowledge. The latter require something that won't take a lot of their time--the materials they require could be dense/packed but it shouldn't take more than a week (or a day!) to complete (it could be a series of intense but short seminars). The former will of course need something that lasts an entire school term. These two general categories can be further broken into finer subcategories and most comments address that already. It would be nice if someone can summarize these comments and present this as a proposal for a curriculum/outreach committee... I'm partial to just calling this Education and Outreach Committee. :)

A couple other things... there's an overlap between this committee/project and the visibility committee and we ought to collaborate with that group in the areas where our aims meet. We should also promote the use of open geospatial data and should work with the [[Public_Geospatial_Data_Committee | Public Geospatial Data Committee]] group for our data needs.

* From Brandon Plewe
OSGEO does not need (nor is in a strong position) to create a curriculum. There are plenty of initiatives already existing to do that (if anything, it's already a bit diluted), such as the [http://www.ucgis.org/priorities/education/modelcurriculaproject.asp UCGIS GIS&T Body of Knowledge]. What OSGEO should be doing is developing teaching/learning materials (labs, tutorials, datasets) that are aligned with these curricula, documenting connections between the general knowledge and OS technical solutions (e.g., "This skill can be performed with GRASS, this one with mapserver"), and getting involved in existing initiatives to make sure that they fairly consider open source solutions. For example, in the UCGIS initiative, we had to do a lot of work at the end to take out vendorese language and include things like mapping hacks.

* From [[User:Punkish | Puneet Kishor]]
I have been reading all the stuff posted on the wiki thus far. Lots of good stuff there. Like others who have tried to grapple with this, we have to be very clear about what we are trying to do. From the thoughts expressed thus far, the following possible objectives emerge --

1. Promote understanding of GIS (I use GIS to encompass not just the software but also the related academic fields of geography, geodesy, geoinformatics, GI Science, and complementary fields of computer science, planning, statistics, whathaveyou). The academia already does so, mostly very well, and with a lot of recognition and financial and institutional backing. The danger in us doing this is that we come off as a diluted version of rigorous academic training, sort of a lesser alternative.

2. Promote open source. The entire open source world does so, mostly very well, and with a lot of recognition, and some financial and institutional backing. The danger in us doing this is that we come off as motivated by some wayward zeal, clubbed with other anti-corporate sentiments.

3. Promote the role of open source in GIS. This is where the committee and the community can play a valuable role. This can be done in various ways -- showcasing innovative projects, building collaborative partnerships with academia, convincing them to use open source tools for GIS education in their classrooms, providing packaged tools and datasets for consumption, and encouraging, suggesting, perhaps even making possible research on and using open source GIS.

I am personally not too sure about certification. The GIS Certification Institute [http://www.gisci.org/ GIS CI] is working in this area, but I feel certification tool-ifies the field, makes it more mechanical, a skill to be mastered rather than a subject to be explored.

Anyway, lots to think about. Thanks again for giving me the opportunity to work with you all on this. By the way, ecogs.osgeo.org is a possible website name for this committee (education curriculum open geo spatial)

* from V.Ravi Kumar
A good account of institutes that offer GIS courses in India are
http://www.gisdevelopment.net/education/inst/india.htm
Most of these are from earth science departments. Even the list above is not comprahensive, for example Osmania university and Andhra University, which are not listed offer courses on Remote sensing with a good part in GIS. The training institute of the Geological Survey of India, Hyderabad, also offers extensive courses, in Remote sensing and Adwanced GIS. OSGEO can break some ice with a chosen few eminent organisations like G.S.I (Geological Survey of India) and a few eminent universities like Osmani University Hyderabad, Delhi University, to start with by offering or sponsering a course on Free-GIS with some assistance through a memorandum of understanding.

== Potential Members ==
''If you add people/orgs to this list, please indicate whether you're adding yourself/your organization or whether you are "nominating" the person/organization as a potential member.''

=== Individuals ===
* Scott Emmons (added by Tyler): University of Northern British Columbia - emmons at unbc.ca.
* Ned Horning (added by self): American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation horning@amnh.org [http://www.geospatial.amnh.org www.geospatial.amnh.org]
* Ari Jolma (added by self): Helsinki University of Technology, Finland ari.jolma at tkk.fi
* Puneet Kishor (added by self): punkish at eidesis dot org; GeoAnalytics, Inc., soon to join [http://www.wisc.edu Univ of Wisconsin - Madison]
* Tyler Mitchell (added by markusN; 2nd: Glennon): Author of Web Mapping Illustrated [http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/webmapping]. Seminars at local schools: University of Northern British Columbia, Canada [http://gis.unbc.ca] and College of New Caledonia, Canada [http://cnc.bc.ca]. Email tylermitchell at shaw.ca.
* Helena Mitasova (added by self): North Carolina State University, hmitaso@unity.ncsu.edu [http://skagit.meas.ncsu.edu/~helena/]
* Pericles Nacionales (added by self): University of Minnesota, naci0002 at umn dot edu
* Matthew Perry (added by self): University of California, Santa Barbara, perrygeo at gmail dot com
* Shaun Walbridge (added by self): University of California, Santa Barbara, walbridge at nceas.ucsb.edu
* Charlie Schweik (added by self): University of Massachusetts, Amherst, cschweik at pubpol dot umass dot edu [http://people.umass.edu/cschweik people.umass.edu/cschweik]
* Ian Turton (added by self; 2nd: Glennon): Penn State Uni, State College, developed Open Web Mapping course at Uni of Leeds, UK [http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/courses/postgrad/geog5780/] now modifying it for PennState. ianturton at gmail com [http://www.geovista.psu.edu/members/turton/index.html work] [http://pennspace.blogspot.com/ blog]
* Venkatesh Raghavan (added by self): Osaka City University, Japan raghavan at .media.osaka-cu.ac.jp
* Aaron Racicot (added by self): Ecotrust, Portland Oregon USA - aaronr at ecotrust.org
* David Hastings (added by self): United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, email hastingsd at un.org
* Arnulf Christl (added by self): [[WhereGroup]] [http://www.wheregroup.com/en/training Training Services]
* V.Ravi Kumar (added by self), Geologist, Hyderabad India. ravivundavalli@yahoo.com [http://freegis.gnu.org.in/grass_geosciencedataset.pdf/ Indian Example]
* Laurent Jégou (added by self), Cartographer, author of curriculums for the Sigma Master at Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, Toulouse, France, jegou@univ-tlse2.fr.

=== Organizations ===

* 52North (added by Andreas Wytzisk): http://www.52north.org
* National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (contact: Mike Goodchild/Alan Glennon): http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu

== Existing Work ==

* [http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/giscc/ The NCGIA Core Curriculum in GIScience]
* [http://www.ucgis.org/priorities/education/modelcurriculaproject.asp The UCGIS Model Curricula Project], including the GIS&T Body of Knowledge, the most comprehensive attempt yet at classifying GIS knowledge
* [http://www.r-s-c-c.org/ Remote Sensing Core Curriculum]
* [http://geoworkforce.olemiss.edu/ IAEGS Curriculum], University of Mississippi, primarily focused on Remote Sensing
* [http://www.usgif.org/content.asp?pl=455&contentid=460 USGIF Academic Committee], aiming to accredit programs for Geospatial Intelligence
* [http://www.gisci.org/ GIS Certification Institute], creating standards for certified GIS Professionals
* [http://www.asprs.org/membership/certification/ ASPRS Certification Programs], including GIS
* [http://people.umass.edu/cschweik/research.html C. Schweik: 2005-2010. NSF CAREER Grant. “The Open Source/Content Commons as a New Paradigm for Collaborative Scientific Research: A Research and Teaching Agenda.”] - MN had some personal conversation at OSG'05
* [http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/courses/postgrad/geog5780/ Open Web Mapping course] - Ian Turton, this is under the creative commons despite living on a University web site, I just haven't got a good new home for it yet.
* D. Hastings, 1994 et seq., The CyberInstitute Short-Course on Geographic Information Systems. Formerly hosted at http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov. Now archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20040221110141/www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/tools/gis/referenc.shtml
* [http://www.gdf-hannover.de/translation GRASS and QGIS Tutorials Translation Portal]
* [http://test.osgeo.net/moodle OSGeo's Moodle Test platform] (some day to be migrated to osgeo.org)
* [[Resultados del Tutorial ISSTOCAM WebGIS]] SDI stack training conducted in Oostende, Belgium.

{{Template:Books}}

[[Category:Education]]

Core Curriculum Project

2007-10-14T20:24:10Z

Wiki-Watry: /* Project Comments */

''This project might be renamed to "Educational & Curriculum" or "Educational Outreach" or "Learning Resources on GIS".''

The project is now officially approved as [[Education and Curriculum Committee]].

== Mission ==

The project aims at creating and promoting curriculum material that supports the goals of the Foundation. The intent is to provide material that is accessible by a broad audience including academia, professionals, and the general public. Material supported through this project should directly or indirectly build and strengthen the open source geospatial user and developer communities. This can be accomplished by integrating the use of OSGeo endorsed tools in curricula that teach geospatial concepts and applications as well as the creating curricula to teach skills necessary for people to actively participate in supported OSGeo software and data projects.

== Approach ==

The project is now officially approved as [[Education and Curriculum Committee]].

=== Database of educational material ===

I propose setting up an open database, where the person interested (teacher or somebody seeking education
for him/herself) makes some selections and is presented with a list of materials and links. There should be material for both preparing for the teaching/learning and for actually carrying out the teaching/learning. Material of the first type includes instructions to install software etc. thus there are links to tasks of other OSGeo projects. The data that describes the material should cover at least data needs, licencing, and (natural) language besides this information:

* type of education
* content of the education
* method of teaching/learning

==== type of education ====

* primary school (students are 7-12 years old)
* secondary school (students are 13-15 years old)
* high school (students are 16-18 years old)
* vocational college
* university, bachelor level (undergraduate)
* university, masters level (graduate)
* university, doctoral level (graduate)
* continuing education (students have a college or university degree and work experience)
* vocational education (students do not have a college or university degree but they have work experience)

==== content of the education ====

These could be divided into two main categories according
to main viewpoint: applied or core geoinformatics.

* a subject from trad. geosciences, not modeling
* a subject from trad. geosciences, involving modeling
* subject from application area, spatial planning
* subject from application area, development studies
* subject from application area, biology, ecology, etc.
* subject from application area, forestry
* subject from application area, civil engineering
* subject from application area, military
* subject from application area, rescue, etc.
* geospatial databases
* explorative geospatial visualization
* geospatial cartographic visualization
* geospatial algorithms
* geospatial statistics
* geospatial simulation
* development of geospatial information systems, analysis
* development of geospatial information systems, design
* development of geospatial information systems, actual development
* development of geospatial information systems, implementation
* development of geospatial information systems, evaluation
* geospatial software development, <insert language>
* geospatial software development, for desktop
* geospatial software development, for web, server side
* geospatial software development, for web, client side

==== method of teaching/learning ====

* lecture
* demonstration
* interactive workshop
* self-learning, reading
* self-learning, using software
* self-learning, project work

== Links to other OSGeo efforts ==

Since teaching GIS is related to GIS data, the collaboration with [http://geodata.osgeo.org Public Geospatial Data Committee] is desired, in particular with the [[Geodata Packaging Working Group]].

== Licensing of teaching material ==

The material developed here needs to be appropriately licensed.
[http://creativecommons.org Creative Commons] licenses come to mind. This will be worked out once the committee is established.

A key component related to this whole effort (related to incentive structures for some) will be how we maintain author attribution over time. This might be as simple as establishing in every document produced a "change log" listing who developed the initial document, and then listing who contributed to new derivative works. Also we need to decide whether we want a standard way of developing curricular material (e.g., wiki pages, open office writer documents, etc.) or if we accept any format, is the wiki set up to allow for the upload of files?

And do we want to try and agree on one open content license that allows for new derivative works or do we want to have a set identified depending on the author's interests? For example, someone might be willing to provide a tutorial but not want new derivative works, while others may be open to having new derivatives works produced from their submission. [Posted by Charlie Schweik]

== Comments ==

=== Comment on Wiki Communication Format ===
[[User:Arnulf Christl | I]] am very happy that this discussion did not yet dissolve into a mailing list. I strongly believe that we should try to keep it in Wiki-style as long as possible. It is a lot easier to get an overview of what is going on this way. For more specific and short term notices one(!) mailing list will be good for sure, but especially for longer term development this Wiki will be more valuable.

=== Project Comments ===

* Ned Horning's comments [[Some_comments|are here]].

* From Helena Mitasova
I read Ned comments - if you look at NCGIA Core Curriculum, it is very broad, so I suggest to keep at least the word Curriculum there (drop Core)--if we want to stress education in general, how about calling it Education and Curriculum Project. It would be great if we could build a curriculum that people who teach at universities and colleges could use to build OSGEO courses and programs (NCGIA curriculum linked in
the document is a good example). For example, if I had to teach geospatial analysis using GRASS, I am OK, but if I wanted to include a section about Mapserver a curriculum section prepared by somebody who has a lot of experience with it would be a great help.

* From Charlie Schweik
Since I am new to this group and have been introduced via my email address, for the group's information let me give you a short status on what I am up to. I am a faculty at University of Massachusetts, Amherst in the Department of Natural Resources Conservation. Right now I have two part-time students helping me develop some tutorials on Q-GIS. I have been teaching an Intro to GIS course for some time but am
relatively new to OS GIS products, so I'll be learning. I am planning on offering in April-May sessions to my students an overview to Q-GIS, and then some tutorials on fundamentals like georeferencing a scanned map, online digitizing, getting GPS data overlaid, etc. I see this as an entry point toward the use of GRASS. My ultimate goal over the next 6-8 months is to have some kind of distance learning material developed for use in an "Intro to OS GIS" online course offered out of my institution next Spring 2007. Having done research in Nepal for several years, part of my motivation for doing this was to help my colleagues there who desperately need GIS but face serious budgetary problems. I am not exactly sure how this will work under the context of my University's distance learning program. But I am a great proponent of open access and hope to use some kind of open content license (e.g., creativecommons.org) and see great value in helping move this project forward by contributing the material here to this broader educational effort. I need to see what kinds of requirements my university has related to material and an "official" online course that might get in the way of this vision. I had always envisioned making my material available somehow (e.g., MIT Open Courseware, FreeGIS.org, etc.) so the establishment of this OSGeo Curriculum and Education project is exciting to me. In short, I hope I can figure out how to use what I am doing to help this project and perhaps through this effort whatever we develop can be improved by the community here.

* From Ari Jolma
Gary Watry from FSU has prepared a [http://indianocean.coaps.fsu.edu/FOSS_GIS/Quantum_GIS.pdf 65 page Quantum GIS tutorial], which could be useful, at least duplicate work should be avoided. I got it from him directly, as far as I know it is not yet on the web.

Concerning the curriculum and education project in general. I think we don't want to do something similar as NCGIA website, which, by the way, is not linked to any specific software as far as I see.

I try to be inpartial in my teaching, which is often difficult in this field and may lead to confusion on the students part sometimes on software issues. I also try to teach theory as opposed to practical use of software. So I have problems trying to figure out what is it that we should produce. I think tutorials like Gary's are good. Another good idea could be complete worked out examples, which the students can re-do, perhaps on their own time (distance learning) or without too much tutoring in a computer classroom. I've done a few like that (for example non-point source modeling and travel time analysis) but they still need quite a lot of tutoring. One problem I have is that as the software develops so fast (and I've used mostly my own..) the procedure changes slightly from year to year.

Using free tools in distance learning is really good because students can freely install their own copies of the software. On the other hand, for example my software is currently Linux-only, so it is not practical with many people. => There's a common interest with the OSGeo project creating installation packages.

I'd like to have some sort of timetable and agreed ways of working: mostly email or mostly wiki?

* From Helena Mitasova (in response to Charlie)
My idea in that respect was to use it to outline what to teach in different units (that is what NCGIA does) and then link to it a material that shows how to do it in a specific software using selected data. So for example we can have a unit on DEMs and topographic analysis
- the Curriculum will outline what is included under that unit and that can then be linked to several materials:
- general theory including equations and algorithms (this can be just a link to a relevant chapter in FreeGISBook)
- teaching material for use with GRASS
- teaching material for use with SAGA
- whatever else will people contribute to support this unit.

In this way we can minimize redundancy, cover number of different software packages and it will have an additional benefit that you can compare and see what would be the best for the class - e.g. topoanalysis in one package maybe more suited for natural resources students a different one would be better for computer science.

* From Prof. Venkatesh Raghavan
I think Curriculum, Education and Capacity Building initiatives
related to OSGEO could be broken down to three (or more) phases

;Phase 1 Short term (six months)
:a) Assimilation of existing tutorial, lecture notes, training documents, presentations that are available or could be made available under Open Document or Creative Commons License.

:b) Discuss how Curriculum can be structured with existing resources. Identify gaps for developing new material.

;Phase 2 Medium term (one year)
:a) Setup a e-learning portal (www.moodle.org) to manage existing course material and obtain user feedback. Have been experimenting with Moodle recently and we are trying to put together a online training course based on some of the material that we developed earlier. Could help with hosting a Moodle site if necessary (http://wgrass.media.osaka-cu.ac.jp/elearn/)

:b) Develop multi-media contents (animations, screen casting), data set for tutorial etc to facilitate self-learning.

;Phase 3 Long term (two three years)

:a) Develop standardized mechanism for testing (question banks, quiz, assignments etc). Moodle is quite good for this purpose

:b) Translation to local language and collection of datasets for geographic locations some language locales. Working with datasets that the candidate is familiar with can make learning easier.

:c) Initial review and improvement of contents and possible establishment of OSGEO Virtual University to cater to education, testing and certification of OSGEO Engineer.

* From Prof. Venkatesh Raghavan
We had discussed issues about Accredited Professional training before, I reproduce some of the thoughts below.
An OSGEO-CE (OSGEO- Certified Engineer), something in the lines of, PostgreSQL-CE, RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer). Having a OSGEO with tie-ups to some Universities,Academic societies, Industry, that could

a) design and market courseware and educational material
b) assure quality
c) provide accreditation to institutions that will start the course and also training to instructors at such institutes.
d) Evolve standardized mechanism for testing and certificate of candidates
c) Issue acrredited certification to successful candidates and provide placement counseling.

I think there is a market for such packaged educational and career solutions at least in Asia. I know of at least a few institutes in Aiaa that have been set-up during the last two years and have successfully (at least in term of candidate intake, the course content leaves a lot to be desired) implemented similar business model for proprietary Geoinfomrtics solutions.

Among numerous benefits that such a initiative would bring about, the one most important would be that it would help generate a pool of qualified professionals and developer who could in turn enrich the OSGEO Community.

Some additional thoughts and info about Professional Certification for OSGEO

a) A Japanese company started a Professional certification for PostgreSQL since 1st March 2005.
Details about the Certification are available at http://osb.sra.co.jp/postgresqlce/about_en.html
The testing is managed by Pearson VUE(http://www.vue.com/).
Details are available at http://www.vue.com/sra/ As per http://osb.sra.co.jp/postgresql-ce/news_en.html#20050224

b)Linux Professional Certification (http://www.lpi.org/en/home.html) offers accredited training and conducts training thru LPI approved training center the worldover. Candidates can register to take LPI exams at Pearson VUE testing centres worldwide(http://www.vue.com/) and Thomson Prometric (http://securereg3.prometric.com/Welcome.aspx) "LPI holds special exam labs at major Linux and IT tradeshows and conferences around the world, often offering LPI certification exams for substantially reduced pricing or in some cases free of cost."

c) Bradford Learning (http://www.bradfordlearning.com/en/start_page.php)
also offers LPI certification apart from various others including
apache, samba, mysql etc.

d) Some other listed as LPI sponsors (http://www.lpi.org/en/sponsors.html) also offer/manage Professional certification

* From David Hastings

I wonder if existing core curricula could be considered as relatively adequate (unless a further assessment determines otherwise). On the other hand, educational/training support for OSS has generally received bad press - and this group could help make considerable progress on that front.

I don't fully agree with the bad press about OSS support. Indeed, I seem to remember that Info World gave Red Hat Linux an award several years back for its support services - partly to counter that bad press. I personally found extensive support when I first used GRASS (in 1987), first became a GRASS system manager (in 1988), first installed Linux and put GRASS on my first dual-boot PC (in 1994), first stumbled across file-level interoperability between two GISs (1995, between GRASS and Idrisi byte data files), etc. Much support has been virtual, through searches of discussion group archives.

Nevertheless, training support for OSS GIS could be stronger. I think this could be the greatest challenge, and opportunity, in the educational arena for an Open-Source Geospatial Foundation.

My attempt to answer this during 1994-2002 was the CyberInstitute Short-Course in GIS, which ran additionally until sometime last year, 3 years after I departed Boulder for Bangkok and the UN. I think that such a general approach, strengthened by the ideas and circumstances of this Foundation, could be a useful piece in the puzzle of OSS educational/training support.

Implementation of something like the CyberInstitute Short-Course could be part of Venka's outline item 1b in his discussion on implementation phases (2 discussions above this one). I'd suggest that the name (CyberInstitute Short-Course) be considered for continuation, as it gained a bit of respect over the decade-plus that it ran on the NOAA/NGDC Website.

Please see my additional comments on the discussion page.

* From Venkatesh Raghavan

a) What are the objectives of the Core Curriculum?

The main focus would be on providing a solid foundation on Geoinformatics technology using OSGEO tools as a means of education and self-learning.

b) Who will be the actual customer to adopt the core curriculum would it be the institution or organisation which would ultimately employ our graduates?

We can think of regular and corporate sponsored training. Also focus on tailor-made courses. Direct marketing to potential clients would require lot of efforts. Maybe we need to think of providing packaged educational solutions (franchising) to institutions and universities.

c) Which kind of institutions/companies would employ OSGEO Prodessionals?

Geoinformatics industry, Government Institutions, NPO, NGO, Self-employed, Geo-contents service providers etc.

d) What would be the entry strategy? Will it be with high end courses or low end courses – i.e. in terms of pricing, content, etc?

We have to see what is presently available and at what cost. Most of info available from Google Search are summarized at http://www.institute.redlands.edu/kemp/certificates.html#Related. Details of two institutions presently offering courses in India are http://www.gisinstitute.net/upcoming.asp?id=27 http://www.mapmiddleeast.org/2006/conference/training.htm and http://www.symbiosis.ac.in/sig/course.htm. One example from Thailand is available at http://www.gac.ait.ac.th/training/catalog.php. Pricing info at these sites could be serve as reference in the Asian context. The course contents have to be decided after more discussions. I think the course should be modular introduced in a phased manner 6-8 weeks

Level 1: Introduction to GIS and Web Mapping Technologies: Basically how to install, use, producing maps using OSGEO tools. Completion of this level could result in certification as “XXXYYY Certified Application User”

Level 2: Geo-spatial Database Development: Open data standards, GML, Remote Sensing, GPS, mobile GIS, RDBMS. Completion of this level could result in certification as “XXXYYY Certified Spatial Database Manager”

Level 3: Advanced Module for Application Developers: Spatial data analysis using GRASS, Web GIS application development,using Mapserver Script languages, PHP, Javascript, Python. Completion of this level could result in certification as “XXXYYY Certified Application Developer”

Level 4: Advanced Module for Software Developers Developing Geoinformatics software and cross-platform GIS solutions e.g. GRASS Programing & Libraries, Data Exchange Libraries, C programming, Qt, Python, Plug-in development for QGIS. Software packaging (RPM etc.) Completion of this level will result in certification as “XXXYYY Certified Geoinfromatics Engineer”

Option to get a Master degree after completion for 4 Levels and conducting project research (in 16 to 18 weeks) could also be considered at a later stage.

* From [[User:Arnulf Christl | Arnulf Christl]]
The [[WhereGroup]] offers professional [http://www.wheregroup.com/en/training Training Services] for the FOSSGIS web services SDI stack that most of our customers need. It includes OSGeo software (Mapbender, MapServer, Quantum GIS, GDAL) and associated packages (GeoServer and PostGIS). This set of courses is designed to convey all information required to professionally operate an SDI stack most efficiently in a short period of time. Courses aim at professionals with previous knowledge in GIS, WebGIS and productive systems operation. This type of course differs from longer term learning followed by universities. The course material is currently published under several licenses at several places. The WhereGroup is in the process of homogenizing licenses and transferring course material and infrastructure to the OSGeo infrastructure. The first bits are already available at http://test.osgeo.net/moodle (Mapbender Introduction). All material can be used in any context including commercial use (for individual terms of use check the corresponding dual license CreativeCommons 2.0, GNU FDL).

* From [[User:Pnaciona | Perry Nacionales]]
I tend to agree with both Arnulf and Prof. Raghavan in that we have two general kinds of audience--those who are in "formal" academia and those who are already in the professional fields trying to expand their knowledge. The latter require something that won't take a lot of their time--the materials they require could be dense/packed but it shouldn't take more than a week (or a day!) to complete (it could be a series of intense but short seminars). The former will of course need something that lasts an entire school term. These two general categories can be further broken into finer subcategories and most comments address that already. It would be nice if someone can summarize these comments and present this as a proposal for a curriculum/outreach committee... I'm partial to just calling this Education and Outreach Committee. :)

A couple other things... there's an overlap between this committee/project and the visibility committee and we ought to collaborate with that group in the areas where our aims meet. We should also promote the use of open geospatial data and should work with the [[Public_Geospatial_Data_Committee | Public Geospatial Data Committee]] group for our data needs.

* From Brandon Plewe
OSGEO does not need (nor is in a strong position) to create a curriculum. There are plenty of initiatives already existing to do that (if anything, it's already a bit diluted), such as the [http://www.ucgis.org/priorities/education/modelcurriculaproject.asp UCGIS GIS&T Body of Knowledge]. What OSGEO should be doing is developing teaching/learning materials (labs, tutorials, datasets) that are aligned with these curricula, documenting connections between the general knowledge and OS technical solutions (e.g., "This skill can be performed with GRASS, this one with mapserver"), and getting involved in existing initiatives to make sure that they fairly consider open source solutions. For example, in the UCGIS initiative, we had to do a lot of work at the end to take out vendorese language and include things like mapping hacks.

* From [[User:Punkish | Puneet Kishor]]
I have been reading all the stuff posted on the wiki thus far. Lots of good stuff there. Like others who have tried to grapple with this, we have to be very clear about what we are trying to do. From the thoughts expressed thus far, the following possible objectives emerge --

1. Promote understanding of GIS (I use GIS to encompass not just the software but also the related academic fields of geography, geodesy, geoinformatics, GI Science, and complementary fields of computer science, planning, statistics, whathaveyou). The academia already does so, mostly very well, and with a lot of recognition and financial and institutional backing. The danger in us doing this is that we come off as a diluted version of rigorous academic training, sort of a lesser alternative.

2. Promote open source. The entire open source world does so, mostly very well, and with a lot of recognition, and some financial and institutional backing. The danger in us doing this is that we come off as motivated by some wayward zeal, clubbed with other anti-corporate sentiments.

3. Promote the role of open source in GIS. This is where the committee and the community can play a valuable role. This can be done in various ways -- showcasing innovative projects, building collaborative partnerships with academia, convincing them to use open source tools for GIS education in their classrooms, providing packaged tools and datasets for consumption, and encouraging, suggesting, perhaps even making possible research on and using open source GIS.

I am personally not too sure about certification. The GIS Certification Institute [http://www.gisci.org/ GIS CI] is working in this area, but I feel certification tool-ifies the field, makes it more mechanical, a skill to be mastered rather than a subject to be explored.

Anyway, lots to think about. Thanks again for giving me the opportunity to work with you all on this. By the way, ecogs.osgeo.org is a possible website name for this committee (education curriculum open geo spatial)

* from V.Ravi Kumar
A good account of institutes that offer GIS courses in India are
http://www.gisdevelopment.net/education/inst/india.htm
Most of these are from earth science departments. Even the list above is not comprahensive, for example Osmania university and Andhra University, which are not listed offer courses on Remote sensing with a good part in GIS. The training institute of the Geological Survey of India, Hyderabad, also offers extensive courses, in Remote sensing and Adwanced GIS. OSGEO can break some ice with a chosen few eminent organisations like G.S.I (Geological Survey of India) and a few eminent universities like Osmani University Hyderabad, Delhi University, to start with by offering or sponsering a course on Free-GIS with some assistance through a memorandum of understanding.

== Potential Members ==
''If you add people/orgs to this list, please indicate whether you're adding yourself/your organization or whether you are "nominating" the person/organization as a potential member.''

=== Individuals ===
* Scott Emmons (added by Tyler): University of Northern British Columbia - emmons at unbc.ca.
* Ned Horning (added by self): American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation horning@amnh.org [http://www.geospatial.amnh.org www.geospatial.amnh.org]
* Ari Jolma (added by self): Helsinki University of Technology, Finland ari.jolma at tkk.fi
* Puneet Kishor (added by self): punkish at eidesis dot org; GeoAnalytics, Inc., soon to join [http://www.wisc.edu Univ of Wisconsin - Madison]
* Tyler Mitchell (added by markusN; 2nd: Glennon): Author of Web Mapping Illustrated [http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/webmapping]. Seminars at local schools: University of Northern British Columbia, Canada [http://gis.unbc.ca] and College of New Caledonia, Canada [http://cnc.bc.ca]. Email tylermitchell at shaw.ca.
* Helena Mitasova (added by self): North Carolina State University, hmitaso@unity.ncsu.edu [http://skagit.meas.ncsu.edu/~helena/]
* Pericles Nacionales (added by self): University of Minnesota, naci0002 at umn dot edu
* Matthew Perry (added by self): University of California, Santa Barbara, perrygeo at gmail dot com
* Shaun Walbridge (added by self): University of California, Santa Barbara, walbridge at nceas.ucsb.edu
* Charlie Schweik (added by self): University of Massachusetts, Amherst, cschweik at pubpol dot umass dot edu [http://people.umass.edu/cschweik people.umass.edu/cschweik]
* Ian Turton (added by self; 2nd: Glennon): Penn State Uni, State College, developed Open Web Mapping course at Uni of Leeds, UK [http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/courses/postgrad/geog5780/] now modifying it for PennState. ianturton at gmail com [http://www.geovista.psu.edu/members/turton/index.html work] [http://pennspace.blogspot.com/ blog]
* Venkatesh Raghavan (added by self): Osaka City University, Japan raghavan at .media.osaka-cu.ac.jp
* Aaron Racicot (added by self): Ecotrust, Portland Oregon USA - aaronr at ecotrust.org
* David Hastings (added by self): United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, email hastingsd at un.org
* Arnulf Christl (added by self): [[WhereGroup]] [http://www.wheregroup.com/en/training Training Services]
* V.Ravi Kumar (added by self), Geologist, Hyderabad India. ravivundavalli@yahoo.com [http://freegis.gnu.org.in/grass_geosciencedataset.pdf/ Indian Example]
* Laurent Jégou (added by self), Cartographer, author of curriculums for the Sigma Master at Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, Toulouse, France, jegou@univ-tlse2.fr.

=== Organizations ===

* 52North (added by Andreas Wytzisk): http://www.52north.org
* National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (contact: Mike Goodchild/Alan Glennon): http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu

== Existing Work ==

* [http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/giscc/ The NCGIA Core Curriculum in GIScience]
* [http://www.ucgis.org/priorities/education/modelcurriculaproject.asp The UCGIS Model Curricula Project], including the GIS&T Body of Knowledge, the most comprehensive attempt yet at classifying GIS knowledge
* [http://www.r-s-c-c.org/ Remote Sensing Core Curriculum]
* [http://geoworkforce.olemiss.edu/ IAEGS Curriculum], University of Mississippi, primarily focused on Remote Sensing
* [http://www.usgif.org/content.asp?pl=455&contentid=460 USGIF Academic Committee], aiming to accredit programs for Geospatial Intelligence
* [http://www.gisci.org/ GIS Certification Institute], creating standards for certified GIS Professionals
* [http://www.asprs.org/membership/certification/ ASPRS Certification Programs], including GIS
* [http://people.umass.edu/cschweik/research.html C. Schweik: 2005-2010. NSF CAREER Grant. “The Open Source/Content Commons as a New Paradigm for Collaborative Scientific Research: A Research and Teaching Agenda.”] - MN had some personal conversation at OSG'05
* [http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/courses/postgrad/geog5780/ Open Web Mapping course] - Ian Turton, this is under the creative commons despite living on a University web site, I just haven't got a good new home for it yet.
* D. Hastings, 1994 et seq., The CyberInstitute Short-Course on Geographic Information Systems. Formerly hosted at http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov. Now archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20040221110141/www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/tools/gis/referenc.shtml
* [http://www.gdf-hannover.de/translation GRASS and QGIS Tutorials Translation Portal]
* [http://test.osgeo.net/moodle OSGeo's Moodle Test platform] (some day to be migrated to osgeo.org)
* [[Resultados del Tutorial ISSTOCAM WebGIS]] SDI stack training conducted in Oostende, Belgium.

{{Template:Books}}

[[Category:Education]]

Core Curriculum Project

2007-10-14T20:22:23Z

Wiki-Watry: /* Individuals */

''This project might be renamed to "Educational & Curriculum" or "Educational Outreach" or "Learning Resources on GIS".''

The project is now officially approved as [[Education and Curriculum Committee]].

== Mission ==

The project aims at creating and promoting curriculum material that supports the goals of the Foundation. The intent is to provide material that is accessible by a broad audience including academia, professionals, and the general public. Material supported through this project should directly or indirectly build and strengthen the open source geospatial user and developer communities. This can be accomplished by integrating the use of OSGeo endorsed tools in curricula that teach geospatial concepts and applications as well as the creating curricula to teach skills necessary for people to actively participate in supported OSGeo software and data projects.

== Approach ==

The project is now officially approved as [[Education and Curriculum Committee]].

=== Database of educational material ===

I propose setting up an open database, where the person interested (teacher or somebody seeking education
for him/herself) makes some selections and is presented with a list of materials and links. There should be material for both preparing for the teaching/learning and for actually carrying out the teaching/learning. Material of the first type includes instructions to install software etc. thus there are links to tasks of other OSGeo projects. The data that describes the material should cover at least data needs, licencing, and (natural) language besides this information:

* type of education
* content of the education
* method of teaching/learning

==== type of education ====

* primary school (students are 7-12 years old)
* secondary school (students are 13-15 years old)
* high school (students are 16-18 years old)
* vocational college
* university, bachelor level (undergraduate)
* university, masters level (graduate)
* university, doctoral level (graduate)
* continuing education (students have a college or university degree and work experience)
* vocational education (students do not have a college or university degree but they have work experience)

==== content of the education ====

These could be divided into two main categories according
to main viewpoint: applied or core geoinformatics.

* a subject from trad. geosciences, not modeling
* a subject from trad. geosciences, involving modeling
* subject from application area, spatial planning
* subject from application area, development studies
* subject from application area, biology, ecology, etc.
* subject from application area, forestry
* subject from application area, civil engineering
* subject from application area, military
* subject from application area, rescue, etc.
* geospatial databases
* explorative geospatial visualization
* geospatial cartographic visualization
* geospatial algorithms
* geospatial statistics
* geospatial simulation
* development of geospatial information systems, analysis
* development of geospatial information systems, design
* development of geospatial information systems, actual development
* development of geospatial information systems, implementation
* development of geospatial information systems, evaluation
* geospatial software development, <insert language>
* geospatial software development, for desktop
* geospatial software development, for web, server side
* geospatial software development, for web, client side

==== method of teaching/learning ====

* lecture
* demonstration
* interactive workshop
* self-learning, reading
* self-learning, using software
* self-learning, project work

== Links to other OSGeo efforts ==

Since teaching GIS is related to GIS data, the collaboration with [http://geodata.osgeo.org Public Geospatial Data Committee] is desired, in particular with the [[Geodata Packaging Working Group]].

== Licensing of teaching material ==

The material developed here needs to be appropriately licensed.
[http://creativecommons.org Creative Commons] licenses come to mind. This will be worked out once the committee is established.

A key component related to this whole effort (related to incentive structures for some) will be how we maintain author attribution over time. This might be as simple as establishing in every document produced a "change log" listing who developed the initial document, and then listing who contributed to new derivative works. Also we need to decide whether we want a standard way of developing curricular material (e.g., wiki pages, open office writer documents, etc.) or if we accept any format, is the wiki set up to allow for the upload of files?

And do we want to try and agree on one open content license that allows for new derivative works or do we want to have a set identified depending on the author's interests? For example, someone might be willing to provide a tutorial but not want new derivative works, while others may be open to having new derivatives works produced from their submission. [Posted by Charlie Schweik]

== Comments ==

=== Comment on Wiki Communication Format ===
[[User:Arnulf Christl | I]] am very happy that this discussion did not yet dissolve into a mailing list. I strongly believe that we should try to keep it in Wiki-style as long as possible. It is a lot easier to get an overview of what is going on this way. For more specific and short term notices one(!) mailing list will be good for sure, but especially for longer term development this Wiki will be more valuable.

=== Project Comments ===

* Ned Horning's comments [[Some_comments|are here]].

* From Helena Mitasova
I read Ned comments - if you look at NCGIA Core Curriculum, it is very broad, so I suggest to keep at least the word Curriculum there (drop Core)--if we want to stress education in general, how about calling it Education and Curriculum Project. It would be great if we could build a curriculum that people who teach at universities and colleges could use to build OSGEO courses and programs (NCGIA curriculum linked in
the document is a good example). For example, if I had to teach geospatial analysis using GRASS, I am OK, but if I wanted to include a section about Mapserver a curriculum section prepared by somebody who has a lot of experience with it would be a great help.

* From Charlie Schweik
Since I am new to this group and have been introduced via my email address, for the group's information let me give you a short status on what I am up to. I am a faculty at University of Massachusetts, Amherst in the Department of Natural Resources Conservation. Right now I have two part-time students helping me develop some tutorials on Q-GIS. I have been teaching an Intro to GIS course for some time but am
relatively new to OS GIS products, so I'll be learning. I am planning on offering in April-May sessions to my students an overview to Q-GIS, and then some tutorials on fundamentals like georeferencing a scanned map, online digitizing, getting GPS data overlaid, etc. I see this as an entry point toward the use of GRASS. My ultimate goal over the next 6-8 months is to have some kind of distance learning material developed for use in an "Intro to OS GIS" online course offered out of my institution next Spring 2007. Having done research in Nepal for several years, part of my motivation for doing this was to help my colleagues there who desperately need GIS but face serious budgetary problems. I am not exactly sure how this will work under the context of my University's distance learning program. But I am a great proponent of open access and hope to use some kind of open content license (e.g., creativecommons.org) and see great value in helping move this project forward by contributing the material here to this broader educational effort. I need to see what kinds of requirements my university has related to material and an "official" online course that might get in the way of this vision. I had always envisioned making my material available somehow (e.g., MIT Open Courseware, FreeGIS.org, etc.) so the establishment of this OSGeo Curriculum and Education project is exciting to me. In short, I hope I can figure out how to use what I am doing to help this project and perhaps through this effort whatever we develop can be improved by the community here.

* From Ari Jolma
Gary Watry from FSU has prepared a [http://indianocean.coaps.fsu.edu/FOSS_GIS/Quantum_GIS.pdf 65 page Quantum GIS tutorial], which could be useful, at least duplicate work should be avoided. I got it from him directly, as far as I know it is not yet on the web.

Concerning the curriculum and education project in general. I think we don't want to do something similar as NCGIA website, which, by the way, is not linked to any specific software as far as I see.

I try to be inpartial in my teaching, which is often difficult in this field and may lead to confusion on the students part sometimes on software issues. I also try to teach theory as opposed to practical use of software. So I have problems trying to figure out what is it that we should produce. I think tutorials like Gary's are good. Another good idea could be complete worked out examples, which the students can re-do, perhaps on their own time (distance learning) or without too much tutoring in a computer classroom. I've done a few like that (for example non-point source modeling and travel time analysis) but they still need quite a lot of tutoring. One problem I have is that as the software develops so fast (and I've used mostly my own..) the procedure changes slightly from year to year.

Using free tools in distance learning is really good because students can freely install their own copies of the software. On the other hand, for example my software is currently Linux-only, so it is not practical with many people. => There's a common interest with the OSGeo project creating installation packages.

I'd like to have some sort of timetable and agreed ways of working: mostly email or mostly wiki?

* From Gary Watry (Florida State University)watry@coaps.fsu.edu
I have been tasked by my boss to put together a set of tutorials on different open source GIS software packages for Grad and Post-Doc Students. I have completed Quantum GIS (QGIS), am working on uDig, then will do MapWindow, Diva-GIS, etc. I want to put all the software tutorials into the same format (Similar to QGIS). Eventually Iwould like to see it added as a distant learning course at FSU. The course work is currently going to several different University Faculties as well as here at FSU. It is also going to over 70 individuals around the world (North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Asia). I have already talked to someone at OSGeo and they said that they would host a copy of all the tutorials as well as a FSU Site when I get it built.

* From Helena Mitasova (in response to Charlie)
My idea in that respect was to use it to outline what to teach in different units (that is what NCGIA does) and then link to it a material that shows how to do it in a specific software using selected data. So for example we can have a unit on DEMs and topographic analysis
- the Curriculum will outline what is included under that unit and that can then be linked to several materials:
- general theory including equations and algorithms (this can be just a link to a relevant chapter in FreeGISBook)
- teaching material for use with GRASS
- teaching material for use with SAGA
- whatever else will people contribute to support this unit.

In this way we can minimize redundancy, cover number of different software packages and it will have an additional benefit that you can compare and see what would be the best for the class - e.g. topoanalysis in one package maybe more suited for natural resources students a different one would be better for computer science.

* From Prof. Venkatesh Raghavan
I think Curriculum, Education and Capacity Building initiatives
related to OSGEO could be broken down to three (or more) phases

;Phase 1 Short term (six months)
:a) Assimilation of existing tutorial, lecture notes, training documents, presentations that are available or could be made available under Open Document or Creative Commons License.

:b) Discuss how Curriculum can be structured with existing resources. Identify gaps for developing new material.

;Phase 2 Medium term (one year)
:a) Setup a e-learning portal (www.moodle.org) to manage existing course material and obtain user feedback. Have been experimenting with Moodle recently and we are trying to put together a online training course based on some of the material that we developed earlier. Could help with hosting a Moodle site if necessary (http://wgrass.media.osaka-cu.ac.jp/elearn/)

:b) Develop multi-media contents (animations, screen casting), data set for tutorial etc to facilitate self-learning.

;Phase 3 Long term (two three years)

:a) Develop standardized mechanism for testing (question banks, quiz, assignments etc). Moodle is quite good for this purpose

:b) Translation to local language and collection of datasets for geographic locations some language locales. Working with datasets that the candidate is familiar with can make learning easier.

:c) Initial review and improvement of contents and possible establishment of OSGEO Virtual University to cater to education, testing and certification of OSGEO Engineer.

* From Prof. Venkatesh Raghavan
We had discussed issues about Accredited Professional training before, I reproduce some of the thoughts below.
An OSGEO-CE (OSGEO- Certified Engineer), something in the lines of, PostgreSQL-CE, RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer). Having a OSGEO with tie-ups to some Universities,Academic societies, Industry, that could

a) design and market courseware and educational material
b) assure quality
c) provide accreditation to institutions that will start the course and also training to instructors at such institutes.
d) Evolve standardized mechanism for testing and certificate of candidates
c) Issue acrredited certification to successful candidates and provide placement counseling.

I think there is a market for such packaged educational and career solutions at least in Asia. I know of at least a few institutes in Aiaa that have been set-up during the last two years and have successfully (at least in term of candidate intake, the course content leaves a lot to be desired) implemented similar business model for proprietary Geoinfomrtics solutions.

Among numerous benefits that such a initiative would bring about, the one most important would be that it would help generate a pool of qualified professionals and developer who could in turn enrich the OSGEO Community.

Some additional thoughts and info about Professional Certification for OSGEO

a) A Japanese company started a Professional certification for PostgreSQL since 1st March 2005.
Details about the Certification are available at http://osb.sra.co.jp/postgresqlce/about_en.html
The testing is managed by Pearson VUE(http://www.vue.com/).
Details are available at http://www.vue.com/sra/ As per http://osb.sra.co.jp/postgresql-ce/news_en.html#20050224

b)Linux Professional Certification (http://www.lpi.org/en/home.html) offers accredited training and conducts training thru LPI approved training center the worldover. Candidates can register to take LPI exams at Pearson VUE testing centres worldwide(http://www.vue.com/) and Thomson Prometric (http://securereg3.prometric.com/Welcome.aspx) "LPI holds special exam labs at major Linux and IT tradeshows and conferences around the world, often offering LPI certification exams for substantially reduced pricing or in some cases free of cost."

c) Bradford Learning (http://www.bradfordlearning.com/en/start_page.php)
also offers LPI certification apart from various others including
apache, samba, mysql etc.

d) Some other listed as LPI sponsors (http://www.lpi.org/en/sponsors.html) also offer/manage Professional certification

* From David Hastings

I wonder if existing core curricula could be considered as relatively adequate (unless a further assessment determines otherwise). On the other hand, educational/training support for OSS has generally received bad press - and this group could help make considerable progress on that front.

I don't fully agree with the bad press about OSS support. Indeed, I seem to remember that Info World gave Red Hat Linux an award several years back for its support services - partly to counter that bad press. I personally found extensive support when I first used GRASS (in 1987), first became a GRASS system manager (in 1988), first installed Linux and put GRASS on my first dual-boot PC (in 1994), first stumbled across file-level interoperability between two GISs (1995, between GRASS and Idrisi byte data files), etc. Much support has been virtual, through searches of discussion group archives.

Nevertheless, training support for OSS GIS could be stronger. I think this could be the greatest challenge, and opportunity, in the educational arena for an Open-Source Geospatial Foundation.

My attempt to answer this during 1994-2002 was the CyberInstitute Short-Course in GIS, which ran additionally until sometime last year, 3 years after I departed Boulder for Bangkok and the UN. I think that such a general approach, strengthened by the ideas and circumstances of this Foundation, could be a useful piece in the puzzle of OSS educational/training support.

Implementation of something like the CyberInstitute Short-Course could be part of Venka's outline item 1b in his discussion on implementation phases (2 discussions above this one). I'd suggest that the name (CyberInstitute Short-Course) be considered for continuation, as it gained a bit of respect over the decade-plus that it ran on the NOAA/NGDC Website.

Please see my additional comments on the discussion page.

* From Venkatesh Raghavan

a) What are the objectives of the Core Curriculum?

The main focus would be on providing a solid foundation on Geoinformatics technology using OSGEO tools as a means of education and self-learning.

b) Who will be the actual customer to adopt the core curriculum would it be the institution or organisation which would ultimately employ our graduates?

We can think of regular and corporate sponsored training. Also focus on tailor-made courses. Direct marketing to potential clients would require lot of efforts. Maybe we need to think of providing packaged educational solutions (franchising) to institutions and universities.

c) Which kind of institutions/companies would employ OSGEO Prodessionals?

Geoinformatics industry, Government Institutions, NPO, NGO, Self-employed, Geo-contents service providers etc.

d) What would be the entry strategy? Will it be with high end courses or low end courses – i.e. in terms of pricing, content, etc?

We have to see what is presently available and at what cost. Most of info available from Google Search are summarized at http://www.institute.redlands.edu/kemp/certificates.html#Related. Details of two institutions presently offering courses in India are http://www.gisinstitute.net/upcoming.asp?id=27 http://www.mapmiddleeast.org/2006/conference/training.htm and http://www.symbiosis.ac.in/sig/course.htm. One example from Thailand is available at http://www.gac.ait.ac.th/training/catalog.php. Pricing info at these sites could be serve as reference in the Asian context. The course contents have to be decided after more discussions. I think the course should be modular introduced in a phased manner 6-8 weeks

Level 1: Introduction to GIS and Web Mapping Technologies: Basically how to install, use, producing maps using OSGEO tools. Completion of this level could result in certification as “XXXYYY Certified Application User”

Level 2: Geo-spatial Database Development: Open data standards, GML, Remote Sensing, GPS, mobile GIS, RDBMS. Completion of this level could result in certification as “XXXYYY Certified Spatial Database Manager”

Level 3: Advanced Module for Application Developers: Spatial data analysis using GRASS, Web GIS application development,using Mapserver Script languages, PHP, Javascript, Python. Completion of this level could result in certification as “XXXYYY Certified Application Developer”

Level 4: Advanced Module for Software Developers Developing Geoinformatics software and cross-platform GIS solutions e.g. GRASS Programing & Libraries, Data Exchange Libraries, C programming, Qt, Python, Plug-in development for QGIS. Software packaging (RPM etc.) Completion of this level will result in certification as “XXXYYY Certified Geoinfromatics Engineer”

Option to get a Master degree after completion for 4 Levels and conducting project research (in 16 to 18 weeks) could also be considered at a later stage.

* From [[User:Arnulf Christl | Arnulf Christl]]
The [[WhereGroup]] offers professional [http://www.wheregroup.com/en/training Training Services] for the FOSSGIS web services SDI stack that most of our customers need. It includes OSGeo software (Mapbender, MapServer, Quantum GIS, GDAL) and associated packages (GeoServer and PostGIS). This set of courses is designed to convey all information required to professionally operate an SDI stack most efficiently in a short period of time. Courses aim at professionals with previous knowledge in GIS, WebGIS and productive systems operation. This type of course differs from longer term learning followed by universities. The course material is currently published under several licenses at several places. The WhereGroup is in the process of homogenizing licenses and transferring course material and infrastructure to the OSGeo infrastructure. The first bits are already available at http://test.osgeo.net/moodle (Mapbender Introduction). All material can be used in any context including commercial use (for individual terms of use check the corresponding dual license CreativeCommons 2.0, GNU FDL).

* From [[User:Pnaciona | Perry Nacionales]]
I tend to agree with both Arnulf and Prof. Raghavan in that we have two general kinds of audience--those who are in "formal" academia and those who are already in the professional fields trying to expand their knowledge. The latter require something that won't take a lot of their time--the materials they require could be dense/packed but it shouldn't take more than a week (or a day!) to complete (it could be a series of intense but short seminars). The former will of course need something that lasts an entire school term. These two general categories can be further broken into finer subcategories and most comments address that already. It would be nice if someone can summarize these comments and present this as a proposal for a curriculum/outreach committee... I'm partial to just calling this Education and Outreach Committee. :)

A couple other things... there's an overlap between this committee/project and the visibility committee and we ought to collaborate with that group in the areas where our aims meet. We should also promote the use of open geospatial data and should work with the [[Public_Geospatial_Data_Committee | Public Geospatial Data Committee]] group for our data needs.

* From Brandon Plewe
OSGEO does not need (nor is in a strong position) to create a curriculum. There are plenty of initiatives already existing to do that (if anything, it's already a bit diluted), such as the [http://www.ucgis.org/priorities/education/modelcurriculaproject.asp UCGIS GIS&T Body of Knowledge]. What OSGEO should be doing is developing teaching/learning materials (labs, tutorials, datasets) that are aligned with these curricula, documenting connections between the general knowledge and OS technical solutions (e.g., "This skill can be performed with GRASS, this one with mapserver"), and getting involved in existing initiatives to make sure that they fairly consider open source solutions. For example, in the UCGIS initiative, we had to do a lot of work at the end to take out vendorese language and include things like mapping hacks.

* From [[User:Punkish | Puneet Kishor]]
I have been reading all the stuff posted on the wiki thus far. Lots of good stuff there. Like others who have tried to grapple with this, we have to be very clear about what we are trying to do. From the thoughts expressed thus far, the following possible objectives emerge --

1. Promote understanding of GIS (I use GIS to encompass not just the software but also the related academic fields of geography, geodesy, geoinformatics, GI Science, and complementary fields of computer science, planning, statistics, whathaveyou). The academia already does so, mostly very well, and with a lot of recognition and financial and institutional backing. The danger in us doing this is that we come off as a diluted version of rigorous academic training, sort of a lesser alternative.

2. Promote open source. The entire open source world does so, mostly very well, and with a lot of recognition, and some financial and institutional backing. The danger in us doing this is that we come off as motivated by some wayward zeal, clubbed with other anti-corporate sentiments.

3. Promote the role of open source in GIS. This is where the committee and the community can play a valuable role. This can be done in various ways -- showcasing innovative projects, building collaborative partnerships with academia, convincing them to use open source tools for GIS education in their classrooms, providing packaged tools and datasets for consumption, and encouraging, suggesting, perhaps even making possible research on and using open source GIS.

I am personally not too sure about certification. The GIS Certification Institute [http://www.gisci.org/ GIS CI] is working in this area, but I feel certification tool-ifies the field, makes it more mechanical, a skill to be mastered rather than a subject to be explored.

Anyway, lots to think about. Thanks again for giving me the opportunity to work with you all on this. By the way, ecogs.osgeo.org is a possible website name for this committee (education curriculum open geo spatial)

* from V.Ravi Kumar
A good account of institutes that offer GIS courses in India are
http://www.gisdevelopment.net/education/inst/india.htm
Most of these are from earth science departments. Even the list above is not comprahensive, for example Osmania university and Andhra University, which are not listed offer courses on Remote sensing with a good part in GIS. The training institute of the Geological Survey of India, Hyderabad, also offers extensive courses, in Remote sensing and Adwanced GIS. OSGEO can break some ice with a chosen few eminent organisations like G.S.I (Geological Survey of India) and a few eminent universities like Osmani University Hyderabad, Delhi University, to start with by offering or sponsering a course on Free-GIS with some assistance through a memorandum of understanding.

== Potential Members ==
''If you add people/orgs to this list, please indicate whether you're adding yourself/your organization or whether you are "nominating" the person/organization as a potential member.''

=== Individuals ===
* Scott Emmons (added by Tyler): University of Northern British Columbia - emmons at unbc.ca.
* Ned Horning (added by self): American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation horning@amnh.org [http://www.geospatial.amnh.org www.geospatial.amnh.org]
* Ari Jolma (added by self): Helsinki University of Technology, Finland ari.jolma at tkk.fi
* Puneet Kishor (added by self): punkish at eidesis dot org; GeoAnalytics, Inc., soon to join [http://www.wisc.edu Univ of Wisconsin - Madison]
* Tyler Mitchell (added by markusN; 2nd: Glennon): Author of Web Mapping Illustrated [http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/webmapping]. Seminars at local schools: University of Northern British Columbia, Canada [http://gis.unbc.ca] and College of New Caledonia, Canada [http://cnc.bc.ca]. Email tylermitchell at shaw.ca.
* Helena Mitasova (added by self): North Carolina State University, hmitaso@unity.ncsu.edu [http://skagit.meas.ncsu.edu/~helena/]
* Pericles Nacionales (added by self): University of Minnesota, naci0002 at umn dot edu
* Matthew Perry (added by self): University of California, Santa Barbara, perrygeo at gmail dot com
* Shaun Walbridge (added by self): University of California, Santa Barbara, walbridge at nceas.ucsb.edu
* Charlie Schweik (added by self): University of Massachusetts, Amherst, cschweik at pubpol dot umass dot edu [http://people.umass.edu/cschweik people.umass.edu/cschweik]
* Ian Turton (added by self; 2nd: Glennon): Penn State Uni, State College, developed Open Web Mapping course at Uni of Leeds, UK [http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/courses/postgrad/geog5780/] now modifying it for PennState. ianturton at gmail com [http://www.geovista.psu.edu/members/turton/index.html work] [http://pennspace.blogspot.com/ blog]
* Venkatesh Raghavan (added by self): Osaka City University, Japan raghavan at .media.osaka-cu.ac.jp
* Aaron Racicot (added by self): Ecotrust, Portland Oregon USA - aaronr at ecotrust.org
* David Hastings (added by self): United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, email hastingsd at un.org
* Arnulf Christl (added by self): [[WhereGroup]] [http://www.wheregroup.com/en/training Training Services]
* V.Ravi Kumar (added by self), Geologist, Hyderabad India. ravivundavalli@yahoo.com [http://freegis.gnu.org.in/grass_geosciencedataset.pdf/ Indian Example]
* Laurent Jégou (added by self), Cartographer, author of curriculums for the Sigma Master at Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, Toulouse, France, jegou@univ-tlse2.fr.

=== Organizations ===

* 52North (added by Andreas Wytzisk): http://www.52north.org
* National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (contact: Mike Goodchild/Alan Glennon): http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu

== Existing Work ==

* [http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/giscc/ The NCGIA Core Curriculum in GIScience]
* [http://www.ucgis.org/priorities/education/modelcurriculaproject.asp The UCGIS Model Curricula Project], including the GIS&T Body of Knowledge, the most comprehensive attempt yet at classifying GIS knowledge
* [http://www.r-s-c-c.org/ Remote Sensing Core Curriculum]
* [http://geoworkforce.olemiss.edu/ IAEGS Curriculum], University of Mississippi, primarily focused on Remote Sensing
* [http://www.usgif.org/content.asp?pl=455&contentid=460 USGIF Academic Committee], aiming to accredit programs for Geospatial Intelligence
* [http://www.gisci.org/ GIS Certification Institute], creating standards for certified GIS Professionals
* [http://www.asprs.org/membership/certification/ ASPRS Certification Programs], including GIS
* [http://people.umass.edu/cschweik/research.html C. Schweik: 2005-2010. NSF CAREER Grant. “The Open Source/Content Commons as a New Paradigm for Collaborative Scientific Research: A Research and Teaching Agenda.”] - MN had some personal conversation at OSG'05
* [http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/courses/postgrad/geog5780/ Open Web Mapping course] - Ian Turton, this is under the creative commons despite living on a University web site, I just haven't got a good new home for it yet.
* D. Hastings, 1994 et seq., The CyberInstitute Short-Course on Geographic Information Systems. Formerly hosted at http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov. Now archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20040221110141/www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/tools/gis/referenc.shtml
* [http://www.gdf-hannover.de/translation GRASS and QGIS Tutorials Translation Portal]
* [http://test.osgeo.net/moodle OSGeo's Moodle Test platform] (some day to be migrated to osgeo.org)
* [[Resultados del Tutorial ISSTOCAM WebGIS]] SDI stack training conducted in Oostende, Belgium.

{{Template:Books}}

[[Category:Education]]

OSGeo education interested participants

2007-10-14T20:18:58Z

Wiki-Watry: /* Contributors by Time Zones */

== Contributors by Interest ==
The following are individuals who have self-identified themselves as interested in contributing or assisting with [[Education and Curriculum Committee]] projects. You are welcome to add yourself to the list and identify areas that you are particular familiar with or interested in contributing to.

* [[User:Punkish | Puneet Kishor]] (chair) (TZ GMT-6)
* [[User: ajolma | Ari Jolma]] (TZ GMT+2) (graduate level education MS, PhD; academic research; primary school education)
* [[User:Neteler | Markus Neteler ]] (TZ GMT+1) (general training/education materials; educational datasets)
* Venkatesh Raghavan (TZ GMT+9)(training/education material; educational datasets, software packaging, translation, e-learning Course Management Systems, Moodle,Certification Mechanisms, experience in international training)
* [[User:Schweik | Charlie Schweik]] (TZ GMT-5) (undergraduate and graduate level education; academic research on open source collaboration, public sector information technology, natural resource management)
* [[User:Pnaciona|Pericles Nacionales]] (general training/education materials; conservation and natural resource management)
* Ned Horning (Winter: GMT-5 Summer: GMT -4) (Interested in promoting open source software development and integrating open source into the conservation community)
* [[User:Tmitchell | Tyler Mitchell]] (TZ GMT-8) (interested in workshop material and curriculum development for high school through to university)
* [[User:Arnulf Christl | Arnulf Christl]] (TZ GMT+2) (Experience as GIS instructor for fulltime workshops, trainings and courses. Organization of commercial training courses with Open Source Geospatial Software. Preparation of course and presentation material, tutorials). (Interest in enhancing presentation material, publishing under Free license, in time hardcopy production, maintenance and update of content just as any OS dev project)
* [[User:Scw | Shaun Walbridge]] (TZ GMT-8) (academic research on open source collaboration; general training/education materials; educational datasets)
* [[User:Perrygeo | Matthew Perry]] (TZ GMT-8) (primarily interested in workshops/lab materials for university students, NGOs and using open source software to demonstrate all fundamental aspects of GIS (theory and practice). Also interested in seeing 'official' training courses and certification)
* [[User:ianturton|Ian Turton]] : Penn State Uni, State College, developed Open Web Mapping course at Uni of Leeds, UK [http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/courses/postgrad/geog5780/] now modifying it for PennState. ianturton at gmail com [http://www.geovista.psu.edu/members/turton/index.html work] [http://pennspace.blogspot.com/ blog]
* [[User:Aaronr | Aaron Racicot]] (TZ GMT-8) (Interested in fostering more collaboration with academia through the introduction of open source GIS in the curriculum. Mainly interested in Undergraduate and Graduate level education and industry (NGO's and for-profit) collaboration. Certification is also an interest.)
* [[User:helena| Helena Mitasova]] (TZ GMT-5) NCSU, Raleigh,NC, GRASS PSC member, interested in graduate level education and research, development of tutorials and workshops, educational dataset, publishing books and journal articles
* [[User:maria | Maria Antonia Brovelli]] (TZ GMT+1) (Polytechnic of Milan and Polytecnic of Zurich, interested in Undergraduate, Graduate and Doctorat level education; academic research on new algorithms developed within open source GIS, on public sector information technology and NSDI, on environment and territory management)
* [[User:volaya| Victor Olaya]] (TZ GMT+1) Spanish Free GIS Book PSC Member. University of Extremadura, Spain. Sextante Proyect [http://www.sextantegis.com]. Interested in creating a free GIS book in spanish and english, and in finding out how both the spanish and the english teams can collaborate and help each other.
* [[User:Maxi71| Massimiliano Cannata]] (TZ GMT+1) (Institute of Earth Sciences - University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland, Graduate and Continuing education; research and development in the field of Web-GIS and Environmental Modelling; consultant for the public administration authorities on environment, land and natural resources management)
* [[User:rob.braswell | Bobby H. Braswell]] (TZ GMT-5) (developing documentation in the form of tutorial modules for training and education, especially related to earth science and remote sensing research)
* [[User:VincentP | Vincent Picavet]] (TZ GMT+1) OSGeo Francophone local chapter and Makina Corpus, FLOSS company. Interested in workshops and courses for FOSS GIS web applications and infrastructures. Particular interest in French language material, translation, and coordination between multi-languages groups.
* [[User:Bwoodall | Bill Woodall]] (TZ GMT-8) (Interested in workshops/labs for Youth, primarily for 4-H Youth Development Program )
* [[User:Mleslie | Mark Leslie]] (TZ GMT+10) Interested in workshop and lab material for a general or technical audience.
* [[User:mlennert | Moritz Lennert ]] (TZ GMT+1) (University undergraduate GIS teaching lab and training course for professionals from "developing" countries; e-learning)
* [[User:ominiverdi | Lorenzo Becchi ]] (TZ GMT+1) (Web GIS developer, FAO cunsultant, interested in everything that can help reducing Digital Divide worldwide and support open knowledge, supporting the spanish GIS book)

== Contributors by Time Zones ==
This should help in planning meetings. If you are not here yet, please add your info, or let me know and I will do so. Going from East to West, we have --

* TZ GMT+9
** Venkatesh Raghavan
* TZ GMT+2
** Ari Jolma
** Arnulf Christl
* TZ GMT+1
** Markus Neteler
** Maria Antonia Brovelli
** Massimiliano Cannata
** Vincent Picavet
* TZ GMT-5
** Ian Turton
** Ned Horning
** Charlie Schweik, Maria Fernandez, Alexander Stepanov, Rob Braswell
* TZ GMT-6
** Puneet Kishor
** Pericles Nacionales
* TZ GMT-8
** Tyler Mitchell
** Shaun Walbridge
** Matthew Perry
** Aaron Racicot
** Bill Woodall

[[Category:Education]]

GeoForAll History

2007-10-14T20:18:10Z

Wiki-Watry: /* Membership */

== Mission ==

The mission of the education committee is to inventory, organize and coordinate the development of educational and curriculum material that supports OSGeo-related education. The intent is to provide appropriately licensed material that is accessible by a broad audience including academia, professionals, and the general public. Material supported through this project should directly or indirectly build and strengthen the open source geospatial user and developer communities. This can be accomplished by integrating the use of FOSS4G tools in curricula that teach geospatial concepts and applications as well as the creating curricula to teach skills necessary for people to actively participate in FOSS4G and free geospatial data projects. The committee also seeks cooperation with academic research projects to promote the use of FOSS4G in research projects, to get FOSS4G used as a platform for research, and to present FOSS4G as a research subject.

== Education Committee related wiki pages ==

* [[Education Contributors]] - Provides a list of contributors or interested individuals. Add your name!
* [[Educational_Content_Inventory]] - Please add information on what you'd like to contribute.
* [[Education Committee Work Program]] - our current list of todos.
* [http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/edu_discuss Our mailing list]

== Meeting Minutes ==

* [http://logs.qgis.org/osgeo/%23osgeo.2006-09-08.log IRC chat log, Sep 9 2006]
* [[FOSS4G2006 minutes]] (Sept. 2006)
* [[EduCom Meeting 1 March 2007]]
* [[FOSS4G2007_Education_BOF_minutes]] '''MOST RECENT!''' (Sept. 2007)

== Membership ==
Formal members of this committee are as follows, however anyone is welcome to participate regardless of status. Please add yourself to the [[Education Contributors]] page and join the mailing to get involved.

* Puneet Kishor
* Ari Jolma
* Markus Neteler
* Venkatesh Raghavan
* Charlie Schweik (Chair)
* Pericles Nacionales
* Ned Horning (Co-chair)
* Helena Mitasova
* David Percy
* Ian Turton
* Maria Brovelli

== Other Edu Group information of possible interest ==
* [[Puneet's Visit to Brazil]] (May 2007)

[[Category:Education]]

GeoConnexion Column

2007-10-14T20:17:20Z

Wiki-Watry: /* Editorial Calender */

This is the home page for "Open Sources", the OSGeo column in [http://www.geoconnexion.com/ GeoConnexion magazine]. Contact mpg if you're interested in helping out.

==Editorial Calender ==

* May 2007 - (1) introductory column (Michael P. Gerlek)
** ''completed and published'' [http://www.geoconnexion.com/uploads/opensources_intv6i5.pdf PDF]

* June 2007 -- (2) ossimPlanet (Mark Lucas)
** ''completed and published'' [http://www.geoconnexion.com/uploads/opensources_intv6i6.pdf PDF]

* July/August 2007 -- (3) BigTIFF (Frank Warmerdam)
** ''completed and published'' [http://www.geoconnexion.com/uploads/opensource_intv6i7.pdf PDF]

* September 2007 -- (4) TOPP/GeoServer (Chris Holmes)
** ''completed'' (not yet published)

* October 2007 -- (5) "The Gift Economy Ain't Free: Getting Help with Open Source Software" (Hobu)
** final copy due 25 August 2007
** ''in preparation''

* November 2007 -- (6) OpenLayers + TileCache (Schuyler Erle)
** final copy due roughly 25 September 2007
** ''not yet started''

* December 2007 -- (7) Mapbender ([[User:Arnulf Christl | Arnulf Christl]])
** final copy due roughly 25 October 2007
** ''not yet started''

* January 2008 -- (8) MapServer (Steve Lime)
** final copy due roughly 25 November 2007
** ''not yet started''

* February 2008 -- (9) GRASS (Malte Halbey-Martin)
** final copy due roughly 25 December 2007
** ''in preparation''

* March 2008 -- (10) GeoNetwork (Jeroen Ticheler)
** final copy due roughly 25 January 2008
** ''not yet started''

* April 2008 -- (11) Public GeoData (Jo Walsh)
** final copy due roughly 25 February 2008
** ''not yet started''

* May 2008 -- (12) MapBuilder (Cameron Shorter)
** final copy due roughly 25 March 2008
** ''not yet started''

* June 2008 -- (13) Commercial Models around Open Source (Dave McIlhagga)
** final copy due roughly 25 April 2008
** ''not yet started''

* Other Future Topics
** ''[topic?]'' -- Daniel Ames: "MapWindow: Open Source GIS for the .NET Framework" or "MapWindow GIS and the BASINS Watershed Modeling System"

** ChrisH: "I could also do something like show how GeoTools fosters uDig and GeoServer and how play in to one another, advances in one get picked up by the others, in a virtuous circle."

* added to end of queue (from earlier pub. dates)
** MapGuide (Bob Bray)
** Education -- PuneetK

==Editorial Notes (from Jeff Thurston)==

'''(1)''' A column in our magazine is 1 page in length. An example is [http://www.geoconnexion.com/uploads/kevinpomfret_intv6i1.pdf here]. Total number of words is about 800. It can be less but not more. If you wish to add an image, then shoot for around 600 words. Try to include the writer's pic at 300 dpi and their affiliation and email - this lets readers identify with the person writing and provides a point of contact.

'''(2)''' Images are a big issue for hardcopy print, especially computer images because they are only 72 dpi usually. Print quality is 300 dpi. That means 300 pixels per square inch for the print process. Most screen captures are reduced to 1/5th their original size when printed - usually causing us to throw them out because they represent the content poorly. Stretching a 72 dpi image to resize it means one still ends up with a 72 dpi image, only bigger. Please aim for 300 dpi if submitting images.

'''(3)''' Content - My policy is to support expression. Someone writes it, I'll support it. I only edit for spelling, grammar and what I consider to be outright libelous. The writer should stand behind their expression. As I mentioned earlier, I am not a programmer. I need your help to peer review programming content (which is why the 'contact point' ) will work well. Ultimately everything in the column will reflect on OSGeo. It's your column, you choose the content. Our Media Pack describes Themes for issues by edition throughout the year. I use these as a guideline.

'''(4)''' Reprint - I am a supporter of the creator maintaining all rights. Whomever submits material owns it as far as I am concerned. All I ask is that we have first right to print (we compete on the basis originality). Once printed, you may do whatever you wish with the material, you own it. We usually archive it online and columns are available for distribution online. Since hardcopy prints are a fixed cost, they can be purchased if anyone wants a few hundred. I don't know the cost, a marketing person can help if needed. Our Media Pack is [http://www.geoconnexion.com/downloads/media_pack2007.pdf here].

'''(5)''' Timeline - I am usually working 90-100 days ahead of time. Be aware that there is delay in hardcopy and get material in early. On the flip side, we publish our articles to online almost immediately after hardcopy production.

Edu Content Management Platform Decision

2007-10-14T20:16:10Z

Wiki-Watry: /* NEW THOUGHTS ON COLLABORATIVE PLATFORM STRATEGY */

This page is for our discussion and decision on the Edu Group's Content Versioning System. My suggested process is this: First, we decide on our decision criteria and possible platform options (these are below. Please add anything I am missing). Then we rank the options based on the decision criteria.

== NEW THOUGHTS ON COLLABORATIVE PLATFORM STRATEGY ==

Here's where I am on this discussion of Moodle/content management:

1) Some content providers will be hosting their own course management systems outside of OSGeo (e.g., Moodle). Others may be using a different system (e.g., Claroline). We will want to record metadata on and link to these external activities.

2) Others may use the OSGeo Moodle platform (Venka is an example)

3) As far as I can tell, “Courses” are the primary unit in Moodle. You can search for courses, but I'm not sure you can search for modules contained within Moodle courses.

4) Some OSGeo edu material will not be courses. They will be self-study modules.

5) Not sure if we need the same platform for serving course material and other material like the FreeGIS book. But in my view, ideally we have a search mechanism that finds both. For example, the user does a search on “Georeferencing” and finds both a FreeGIS chapter entry on theory related to it, a teaching presentation on the subject, and tutorials on how to do it using various tools (Grass, QGIS, etc.)

6) New derivatives. Like in open source software, content authors should be the maintainers of their modules. We should serve production versions that are “locked”, and also have some mechanism for someone to derive a new release. For example, I'd be happy if someone wanted to take my QGIS V.8 tutorial material and revise when QGIS v.9 comes out. But I think I should be aware of someone wanting to do that, and give this person permission to derive a new work from my material. Perhaps we control this by encouraging production content to be provided in pdf form and use that as our standard module format.

'''HERE'S WHAT I THINK WE NEED:'''

A MODULE METADATA SYSTEM that allows our OSGeo website visitors to search for modules, or full courses.

This system needs the metadata fields we have listed on the wiki inventory page: Author Name(s), Affilation, URL, Description, Keywords, Date published, Version #, License, Target audience, Language, Relevant software, Additional comments

The URL field could link to a Moodle course, a Module stored on a Moodle system, or any other location within OSGeo's system or external to OSGeo.

OSGeo members need to be able to enter new records into this system.

'''MY QUESTIONS:'''

- Am I off in my thinking anywhere?
- Can Moodle do what I'm thinking we need? I don't think it can. I think we need a database-driven search and post data application with our metadata fields.

== DECISION CRITERIA ==
(Edu team - please add any others you think are missing)

1) MODULE (NOT COURSE) FOCUS. (not necessarily course focus). This way people can pick and choose modules for courses. But this could be compatible with Moodle. If we have modules somewhere someone could develop a course and link to them using Moodle.

2) SEARCH FUNCTION. (this is where I think the wiki approach might break down and a database-driven platform might be better). Metadata to search on would include: software used, version, title/keywords, author, license.

3) AUTHOR ATTRIBUTION CAPABILITY. Needs to have a system that can be cited by various authors as a "contribution." This is important, for example, for junior university faculty who want to cite their contribution as "service" to the discipline as part of their tenure files.

4) MODULE STORAGE FORMAT. I think we want something that embraces a variety of storage formats for various authors have their preferences (e.g., Open Office writer, Word, HTML, LaTex) but we may want to recommend a format and it probably should be something that can be easily transferred from one format to another. This is where the wiki structure didn't work well for me. Moving from my wiki to the OSGeo wiki was a little painful because the graphics had to be uploaded separately. And an XML compatible format is probably important too.

5) HOSTED BY OSGeo?
It is probably better if OSGeo's technology folks host the system but our group administers it? If so, this probably moves us more to the Moodle or Wiki option or some other platform if Tyler can get it installed for us on OSGeo's server (I'm thinking here the [http://cosl.usu.edu/projects/educommons eduCommons] software. If so, we need to make sure there is a way to link our modules to other open educational content respositories so that more people find our content.

6) BACKUP/ARCHIVE SYSTEM
Platform should be regularly backed up so that content hosted on the platform can be recovered.

7) METHODS CAN BE ESTABLISHED TO "LINK" OSGEO MODULES TO OTHER OPEN EDUCATIONAL REPOSITORIES (e.g. Rice Connexions, Open Education Consortium, etc.)

8) CAN STORE READING MATERIALS. Can provide a way for us to enter FOSSGeo educational readings/biliography which is also searchable.

== IDENTIFIED OPTIONS ==

1) Tylers WIKI example (I need a link to this)

2) [http://test.osgeo.net/moodle/login/index.php OSGeo's Moodle platform]

* If we go with either of the above, I think we should consider a storage format that is not a wiki page, but work with uploaded files, and make sure people can find things by modules

3) [http://cnx.rice.edu Rice Connexions] - this is Module focused, and allows you to set up an OSgeo "lens" for searching. But I'm thinking we may want to store our material elsewhere and then maybe list modules here with external links to our platform if that is possible.

4) [http://cosl.usu.edu/projects/educommons educommons system]
I need to look at this more. But it looks like it might have what we are looking for. If we like it, could we get it installed on OSGeo's server?

5) Any others? (Please add them here)

== OTHER RELATED ISSUES ==

1) MODULE STRUCTURE TEMPLATE. Should we come up with a "recommended structure/template" to be used for new tutorials? Is anyone at the moment starting to write a tutorial and want to try this?

[[Category: Education]]

Prototype

2007-10-14T20:14:57Z

Wiki-Watry: /* [http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/gis/index.html OSS4G tutorials by Gary Watry] */

This page is a prototype page for higher education modules. The UMass team is working on this page currently.

----
=== Introduction ===
This page offers higher-education resources related to Free/Libre and Open Source Geographic Information Systems (Foss GIS). Others are welcome to contribute. Currently (see below) these materials are organized by course and by the main author or organization involved. Unless otherwise noted, these courses are offered as an "as is" basis and have not undergone any official OSGeo peer-review process. (See below section on "where we hope to go")

As this project operates within [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_content open content paradigm], we encourage educators, students and professionals to contribute to the project by adding new modules, by editing/updated new modules and by sharing new datasets. It’s important to add new “roadmaps” or new course outlines so other could use them as well.

=== Completed Course Materials (internal and external links) ===

==== [[Introduction to Free/Libre and Open Source GIS v.1.0]] ====
*This course, in its development, replicates the development of typical GIS project, from data development, data analysis to presentation of analysis of results. The course utilizes [http://www.qgis.org qGIS], Grass-plug-in and [http://www.postgresql.org PostgreSQL]/[http://postgis.refractions.net/ PostGIS] as major GIS tools. The course was designed and tested in 2006-2007 and supported by UMass Team ([http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/User:Charlie C. Schweik et al]).
*Level: beginners to intermediate users

=== Courses under construction ===

==== A Course outline: [[Spatial Hydrology]] (this will soon be moved to geoinformatics.tkk.fi Ari Jolma) ====

=== External Links ===

==== [http://geoinformatics.tkk.fi Course materials by Ari Jolma]====

==== [http://www.geoinformation.net/ Geoinformation.net is a Portal prividing general GIS lectures and courses (in german language)] ====

=== [[Repository of modules]] ===

*[http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Repository_of_modules All modules]
*[lectures/ assignements/excercies]
*[by application area]
*[by software]
*[by level]

=== Where we hope to go ===

In the future, we hope to move this to a system that is more easily searchable, and is built around the modular concept, where each module/block is a complete unit, introducing some theoretical concept, GIS approach or software-related skill. Some OSGeo tutorial standard needs to be established, and each learning module should be classified by the skill-level of the target audience, as well as by application area, type of lessons, etc (refer to Table 1 for detail [[classification scheme]]). And while modules should be independent, ideally, each module would include a list of prerequisite modules and may also provide suggestions for relevant modules to explore after that. And these modules are independent and prepared by different people and organizations, they are compliant with each other (or with OSGEO EDU standards). We think the development of a kind of "module buffet" be available, where educators can utilize a sequence of modules related to their area and goals, as a “roadmap” and/or “skeleton” for their courses. In other words, the idea is to create an environment where educators can search and select modules that match their goals.

OSGeo education interested participants

2007-10-14T20:12:28Z

Wiki-Watry: /* Contributors by Interest */

== Contributors by Interest ==
The following are individuals who have self-identified themselves as interested in contributing or assisting with [[Education and Curriculum Committee]] projects. You are welcome to add yourself to the list and identify areas that you are particular familiar with or interested in contributing to.

* [[User:Punkish | Puneet Kishor]] (chair) (TZ GMT-6)
* [[User: ajolma | Ari Jolma]] (TZ GMT+2) (graduate level education MS, PhD; academic research; primary school education)
* [[User:Neteler | Markus Neteler ]] (TZ GMT+1) (general training/education materials; educational datasets)
* Venkatesh Raghavan (TZ GMT+9)(training/education material; educational datasets, software packaging, translation, e-learning Course Management Systems, Moodle,Certification Mechanisms, experience in international training)
* [[User:Schweik | Charlie Schweik]] (TZ GMT-5) (undergraduate and graduate level education; academic research on open source collaboration, public sector information technology, natural resource management)
* [[User:Pnaciona|Pericles Nacionales]] (general training/education materials; conservation and natural resource management)
* Ned Horning (Winter: GMT-5 Summer: GMT -4) (Interested in promoting open source software development and integrating open source into the conservation community)
* [[User:Tmitchell | Tyler Mitchell]] (TZ GMT-8) (interested in workshop material and curriculum development for high school through to university)
* [[User:Arnulf Christl | Arnulf Christl]] (TZ GMT+2) (Experience as GIS instructor for fulltime workshops, trainings and courses. Organization of commercial training courses with Open Source Geospatial Software. Preparation of course and presentation material, tutorials). (Interest in enhancing presentation material, publishing under Free license, in time hardcopy production, maintenance and update of content just as any OS dev project)
* [[User:Scw | Shaun Walbridge]] (TZ GMT-8) (academic research on open source collaboration; general training/education materials; educational datasets)
* [[User:Perrygeo | Matthew Perry]] (TZ GMT-8) (primarily interested in workshops/lab materials for university students, NGOs and using open source software to demonstrate all fundamental aspects of GIS (theory and practice). Also interested in seeing 'official' training courses and certification)
* [[User:ianturton|Ian Turton]] : Penn State Uni, State College, developed Open Web Mapping course at Uni of Leeds, UK [http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/courses/postgrad/geog5780/] now modifying it for PennState. ianturton at gmail com [http://www.geovista.psu.edu/members/turton/index.html work] [http://pennspace.blogspot.com/ blog]
* [[User:Aaronr | Aaron Racicot]] (TZ GMT-8) (Interested in fostering more collaboration with academia through the introduction of open source GIS in the curriculum. Mainly interested in Undergraduate and Graduate level education and industry (NGO's and for-profit) collaboration. Certification is also an interest.)
* [[User:helena| Helena Mitasova]] (TZ GMT-5) NCSU, Raleigh,NC, GRASS PSC member, interested in graduate level education and research, development of tutorials and workshops, educational dataset, publishing books and journal articles
* [[User:maria | Maria Antonia Brovelli]] (TZ GMT+1) (Polytechnic of Milan and Polytecnic of Zurich, interested in Undergraduate, Graduate and Doctorat level education; academic research on new algorithms developed within open source GIS, on public sector information technology and NSDI, on environment and territory management)
* [[User:volaya| Victor Olaya]] (TZ GMT+1) Spanish Free GIS Book PSC Member. University of Extremadura, Spain. Sextante Proyect [http://www.sextantegis.com]. Interested in creating a free GIS book in spanish and english, and in finding out how both the spanish and the english teams can collaborate and help each other.
* [[User:Maxi71| Massimiliano Cannata]] (TZ GMT+1) (Institute of Earth Sciences - University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland, Graduate and Continuing education; research and development in the field of Web-GIS and Environmental Modelling; consultant for the public administration authorities on environment, land and natural resources management)
* [[User:rob.braswell | Bobby H. Braswell]] (TZ GMT-5) (developing documentation in the form of tutorial modules for training and education, especially related to earth science and remote sensing research)
* [[User:VincentP | Vincent Picavet]] (TZ GMT+1) OSGeo Francophone local chapter and Makina Corpus, FLOSS company. Interested in workshops and courses for FOSS GIS web applications and infrastructures. Particular interest in French language material, translation, and coordination between multi-languages groups.
* [[User:Bwoodall | Bill Woodall]] (TZ GMT-8) (Interested in workshops/labs for Youth, primarily for 4-H Youth Development Program )
* [[User:Mleslie | Mark Leslie]] (TZ GMT+10) Interested in workshop and lab material for a general or technical audience.
* [[User:mlennert | Moritz Lennert ]] (TZ GMT+1) (University undergraduate GIS teaching lab and training course for professionals from "developing" countries; e-learning)
* [[User:ominiverdi | Lorenzo Becchi ]] (TZ GMT+1) (Web GIS developer, FAO cunsultant, interested in everything that can help reducing Digital Divide worldwide and support open knowledge, supporting the spanish GIS book)

== Contributors by Time Zones ==
This should help in planning meetings. If you are not here yet, please add your info, or let me know and I will do so. Going from East to West, we have --

* TZ GMT+9
** Venkatesh Raghavan
* TZ GMT+2
** Ari Jolma
** Arnulf Christl
* TZ GMT+1
** Markus Neteler
** Maria Antonia Brovelli
** Massimiliano Cannata
** Vincent Picavet
* TZ GMT-5
** Gary Watry
** Ian Turton
** Ned Horning
** Charlie Schweik, Maria Fernandez, Alexander Stepanov, Rob Braswell
* TZ GMT-6
** Puneet Kishor
** Pericles Nacionales
* TZ GMT-8
** Tyler Mitchell
** Shaun Walbridge
** Matthew Perry
** Aaron Racicot
** Bill Woodall

[[Category:Education]]

GeoConnexion Column

2007-02-21T11:46:34Z

Wiki-Watry:

''This is a starting page for collecting fodder for an OSGeo-based column in GeoConnexion magazine.''

If you would like to volunteer, please list your name and topic below.

* Michael P. Gerlek: intro to open source, what/who is osgeo, etc

* Chris Holmes: ''[topic?]''

* Daniel Ames: ''[topic?]''

* Gary Watry ''[topic]''

* '''[insert your name here]'''

All Members

2006-08-11T16:50:23Z

Wiki-Watry:

{| border="1" class="wikitable" style="margin: 1em 1em 1em 0; background: #f9f9f9; border: 1px #aaaaaa solid; border-collapse: collapse;"
! style="background:#efefef;" | Name
! style="background:#ffdead;" | Affiliations
! style="background:#efefef;" | OSGeo Projects
! style="background:#ffdead;" | (Lat,Lon)
! style="background:#efefef;" | About
|-
| Add yourself
| Everyone is welcome
| In which OSGeo Projects and Committees are you involved
| Input lat/long here
| Copy and paste this entry, put it last, and add your information
|-
| Chris Holmes
| [http://topp.openplans.org The Open Planning Project], [http://geoserver.org GeoServer]
| [http://incubator.osgeo.org Incubator], [http://board.osgeo.org Board], [http://geotools.org GeoTools]
| (40.72,-74.00)
| I come from the Java side of the OSGeo fence, getting my start in GeoServer, where I was lead developer for a couple years, and GeoTools, where I still serve on the PMC. My time is made possible by [http://topp.openplans.org The Open Planning Project (TOPP)], a great non-profit in New York that has been the lead supporter of GeoServer for years now. I spent the last year in Zambia on a Fulbright Scholarship, looking at the potential for open source software to help implement spatial data infrastructures in developing countries. It was a bit of a failure, but I learned a ton, and I see a lot of potential for open source in developing countries, towards truly open spatial data infrastructures. I'm back at TOPP, in a new role as VP of Strategic Development, helping to grow the organization, and figuring out how to make our geospatial stuff self sustaining. Once that's rolling, I hope to reinvest extra revenue in to figuring out and building a truly open geospatial web. And just like apache and linux are the bedrock that the World Wide Web rests on, so too do I believe that the geospatial web necessarily must be built on a foundation of OS Geo software. My continuing thoughts on all of this can be found at http://cholmes.wordpress.com
|-
| Michael P. Gerlek
| [http://www.lizardtech.com LizardTech]
| [http://visibilitycommittee.osgeo.org Promotion and Visibility Committee] (chair)
| (47.673166,-122.530143)
| Manager of LizardTech's Engineering department, where we do MrSID and JPEG 2000 stuff and play with with the next generation of technologies for supporting raster data GIS workflows. No, our products are not open source -- but we do very much support and use open source and open standards. (I think there is room in the world for both the open and closed development models, and I have a strong interest in helping "closed" companies understand the value of, and contribute to, the open software world.) [[User:mpg]]
|-
| Frank Warmerdam
| Independent
| [http://www.gdal.org GDAL/OGR], [http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu MapServer], [http://incubator.osgeo.org Incubator], [http://board.osgeo.org Board]
| (45.45,-77.25)
| Lead developer of GDAL/OGR and freelance geospatial software developer.
|-
| Jason Birch
| [http://www.nanaimo.ca/ City of Nanaimo]
| [http://webcommittee.osgeo.org Web Site], [http://visibilitycommittee.osgeo.org Promotion & Visibility]
| (49.155, -124.005)
| I am a long-time GIS/IT/'Net junkie, and am currently working for the City of Nanaimo's IT department as a Sr. Applications Analyst (GIS Specialist). I am excited about what I see happening in the open source geospatial world, with OSGeo as a catalyst. [[User:Jasonbirch]]
|-
|Howard Butler
| [http://www.hobu.biz/ Hobu, Inc]
| [http://webcommittee.osgeo.org Web Site Committee],
| (42.00, -93.00)
| MapServer hacker, MTSC member. GDAL hacker. ESRI ArcSDE hack. Purveyor of Windows binary builds [[User:hobu]]
|-
| Markus Neteler
| [http://mpa.itc.it ITC-irst], [http://www.cealp.it CEA], [http://www.gdf-hannover.de GDF Hannover]
| [http://grass.itc.it GRASS GIS], [http://board.osgeo.org Board], [http://geodata.osgeo.org Public Geodata Com.], [http://edu.osgeo.org Education Com.], [http://visibilitycommittee.osgeo.org Promotion & Visibility Com.]
| (46.06714, 11.15113)
| Developer of GRASS GIS, researcher at ITC-irst + CEA, Trento, Italy and co-founder of GDF Hannover [[User:neteler]]
|-
| R. Paul Warriner
| [http://www.orchardparkny.org/ Town of Orchard Park]
| [http://fundraising.osgeo.org Fundraising Committee], [http://webcommittee.osgeo.org Web Site Committee]
| (43.17, -78.69)
| Network Coordinator, old oil field hand (really, I do know what a christmas tree is).
[[User:RPaulW]]
|-
|Bart van den Eijnden
| [http://www.osgis.nl/ OSGIS]
| [http://chameleon.maptools.org Chameleon],
| (52.0768396070808, 5.12454)
| Freelancer working with several open source GIS tools, mainly Chameleon, Mapserver and Geoserver.
[[User:bartvde]]
|-
| Helena Mitasova
| [http://skagit.meas.ncsu.edu/~helena/ North Carolina State University]
| [http://grass.itc.it GRASS GIS], [http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Core_Curriculum_Project Curriculum project]
| (35.77, -78.69)
| Researcher at NCSU (geospatial technology, environmental modeling, sustainable development), Developer of GRASS GIS. [[User:Helena]]
|-
| Daniel Morissette
| [http://www.mapgears.com/ Mapgears]
| [http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/ MapServer], [http://www.gdal.org GDAL/OGR]
| (48.42, -71.04)
| Involved in MapServer, GDAL/OGR and most [http://maptools.org/ MapTools.org] projects, mostly around webmapping and data access and distribution. [[User:dmorissette]]
|-
| Tamas Szekeres
| [http://www.hmeirt.hu/ MoD ED Co.]
| [http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/ MapServer]
| (47.56, 19.08)
| M.Sc.El.Engineer, Head of Development Department, GPS Division , MapServer contributor/hacker, mapscript C# maintainer, involved in various WEB mapping and desktop applications, GPS navigation and tracking systems. [[User:szekerest]]
|-
| Ari Jolma
| [http://users.tkk.fi/~jolma/index.html TKK]
| [http://www.gdal.org GDAL/OGR], [http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Core_Curriculum_Project Curriculum project]
| (60° 16' , 24° 47' 4'')
| Professor at TKK, Finland (geoinformatics, environmental information systems, water resources systems), [http://map.hut.fi/PerlForGeoinformatics/ just another Perl hacker] [[User:ajolma]]
|-
| Jeff McKenna
| [http://www.dmsolutions.ca DM Solutions Group]
| [http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/ MapServer]
| (45.401397610, -75.725861625)
| MapServer documentation, [http://www.maptools/ms4w MS4W] maintainer, [http://www.maptools.org maptools] co-maintainer. [[User:jmckenna]]
|-
| Ian Turton
| [http://www.geovista.psu.edu/members/turton/index.html work][http://pennspace.blogspot.com/ blog]
| [http://www.geotools.org GeoTools]
| (40.7932, -77.847)
| [http://www.geotools.org GeoTools] founder and developer, [http://www.geovistastudio.psu.edu GeoVistaStudio] benevolent dictator, [http://geoserver.org GeoServer] user. [[User:ianturton]]
|-
| David Blasby
| [http://topp.openplans.org The Open Planning Project], [http://geoserver.org GeoServer], [http://geotools.org GeoTools]
| [http://geotools.org GeoTools]
| (varies)
| Currently, I'm the Project Lead for Geoserver and am on the GeoTools Project Management Committee. I'm just starting a GeoWiki (Public Participation GIS) (please contact me if you're interested). I was the orginal creator of PostGIS, and have contributed to several OS GIS projects, including JTS, JUMP, and Mapserver.
|-
| Andrey Kiselev
| "Radar" R&D Centre (Russia)
| GDAL/OGR
| (60.04,30.33)
| Freelance developer and contributor to GDAL/OGR project.
|-
| Helton Uchoa
| [http://www.geolivre.org.br Geolivre Community], [http://www.open3dgis.org Open 3D GIS Project]
| [http://webcommittee.osgeo.org Web Site Committee] and [http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Public_Geospatial_Data_Project Public Geospatial Data Project]
| (-22.96, -43.11)
| I'm a Geomatics Enginner and I work at [http://www.opengeo.com.br OpenGEO Company] as a GIS Specialist. I'm responsible for many GIS projects using FOSS and the OpenGIS Specifications in Brazil and I have some relevant papers and scientific articles presented in Brazilian and Latin-American conferences and published in scientific magazines. In last year, I have helped, as a teacher, introduce the GNU/FSF philosophy at the Transportation Engineering Department of IME ([http://www.ime.eb.br Military Institute of Engineering - IME], Brazil). I have worked in Geolivre Rio 2004 and 2005 as member of organization commitee. Now I'm working in [http://www.geolivre.org Geolivre Conference 2007]. [[User:Uchoa]]
|-
| Toru Mori
| [http://www.orkney.co.jp/english Orkney, Inc.]
| [http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/ MapServer], [http://grass.itc.it GRASS GIS]
| (35.448, 139.642)
| President of Orkney, Inc. Advocate of Open Geospatial tools in Japan and Asia. Promote open geospatial data. [[User:moritoru]]
|-
| Allan Doyle
| [http://www.eogeo.org EOGEO],[http://museum.mit.edu/cmp MIT Museum],[http://spg.gsfc.nasa.gov/ NASA Earth Science Data Systems Standards Process Group]
| [http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Public_Geospatial_Data_Project Public Geospatial Data Project]
| (42.28, -71.24)
| President of [http://www.eogeo.org EOGEO] and [http://www.intl-interfaces.com International Interfaces], long-time geo-interoperability interests, opensourced (is that a verb?) [http://openmap.bbn.com OpenMap], originator of OGC testbed idea, Web Mapping Testbed, WMS spec editor, worked on WMS Context, [http://www.georss.org GeoRSS]. [http://www.eogeo.org/Members/adoyle more details]. [http://think.random-stuff.org Blog][[User:adoyle]]
|-
| Ned Horning
| [http://cbc.amnh.org/ Center for Biodiversity and Conservation], [http://www.amnh.org/ American Museum of Natural History]
| [http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Core_Curriculum_Project Curriculum project]
|(43.9933, -73.0407)
|Program manager for [http://geospatial.amnh.org/ remote sensing/GIS]. Promoter of open source geospatial tools in the global conservation community.
|-
| Paul Spencer
| [http://www.dmsolutions.ca DM Solutions Group]
| [http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/ MapServer], [http://chameleon.maptools.org Chameleon], [http://ka-map.maptools.org kaMap], [http://maptools.org/maplab/index.phtml MapLab], [http://maptools.org/ms4w/index.phtml MS4W], [http://openev.sourceforge.net/ OpenEV]
| (45.401397610, -75.725861625)
| CTO of DM Solutions Group, designer/developer/contributor to many open source packages, especially based on MapServer. Recent interest/focus is on AJAX clients for mapping applications. [[User:pagameba]]
|-
| Mark Lucas
| remotesensing.org
| [http://www.remotesensing.org remotesensing.org] and [http://www.ossim.org ossim]
| (27.9690219N, 080.5590534W altitude sea level + 5m)
| CTO, original founder of ImageLinks and remotesensing.org. Board of Directors [http://www.oss-institute.org/ Open Source Software Institute] and the [http://www.ncospr.org/ National Center for Open Source Policy and Research]. Member of [http://www.opentechdev.org Open Technology Development] Tiger team for the Department of Defense (USA). Lead a team of talented developers on the OSSIM and [http://www.ossim.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=3 osgPlanet] projects. Previously spent 22 years in the United States Air Force and [http://www.nro.gov/ National Reconnaissance Office] and the [http://www.fas.org/irp/nro/hall3.htm Secretary of the Air Force Special Projects] organization working with various classified programs. Prior to Radiant Blue Technologies, was a Lead Scientist for Intelligence Data Systems, Titan Corporation, and L3-Communciations. [http://web.mac.com/mlucas17/iWeb/Site/Welcome.html Personal Web site]. [[User:mlucas17]]
|-
| Jo Walsh
| [http://okfn.org/geo/ Open Knowledge Foundation],[http://mappinghacks.com/ Mapping Hacks], [http://publicgeodata.org Public Geodata]
| Open Geodata committee
| (42.368297,-71.108696)
| Came to geospatial software through collaborative mapping on the semantic web work. Organising events to get geospatial hackers together with data-creating people and promote public access to state collected geodata. If you are in Europe please see [http://publicgeodata.org Public Geodata] and consider writing to an MEP about public domain data and "intellectual property rights" issues. If you collect GPS tracks, please consider uploading them to [http://openstreetmap.org/ OpenStreetmap] - my only real contribution to this project is to talk about it a lot. I co-wrote "Mapping Hacks" with Schuyler Erle and Rich Gibson, with a lot of contributions from OSGeo type of people. Last year wrote a lot of software using OSM and [http://openguides.org/ OpenGuides] with [[Mapserver]] to provide a basis for collaborative local "portal" type services on community wireless networks. Now more interested in doing collaborative writing and research projects. [[User:JoWalsh]]
|-
| Dave McIlhagga
| [http://www.dmsolutions.ca DM Solutions Group]
| [http://visibilitycommittee.osgeo.org Promotion and Visibility Committee]
| (45.401397610, -75.725861625)
| President & CEO of DM Solutions Group. Active promoter of open source geospatial technologies. Led DM Solutions Group to become a major contributor and advocate of MapServer and development of key open source MapServer utilities including [http://chameleon.maptools.org Chameleon], [http://ka-map.maptools.org kaMap], [http://maptools.org/maplab/index.phtml MapLab], [http://maptools.org/ms4w/index.phtml MS4W]. Provided financial and resource support for setup of a key home for open source geospatial projects at [http://www.maptools.org MapTools]. Led the organizing committee for [http://www.omsug.ca/osgis2004/index.html OSGIS], the first Open Source Geospatial conference in North America which coincided with the second MapServer User Meeting. Spearheaded the integration of the two major open source geospatial conferences from North America and Europe/Asia, as the [http://www.foss4g2006.org/ Free and Open Source Software for Geoinformations] single international event to be held in Lausanne Switzerland. [[User:davemac]]
|-
| Pericles (Perry) Nacionales
| [http://land.umn.edu University of Minnesota]
| [http://webcommittee.osgeo.org Web Site Committee]
| (44.9873167, -93.1851500)
| Promoter of open source geospatial technologies specially in the field of natural resources management and conservation, advocate of open and interoperability standards, MTSC member, author of [http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/tutorial/tutorial/tutorial MapServer Tutorial].
|-
| Norman Vine
| Independent
|
| (41:31:38N, 70:39:43W)
| Independent software developer [[User:Nhv]]
|-
| Mike Adair
| [http://www.geoconnections.org/CGDI.cfm Natural Resources Canada/GeoConnections]
| [http://communitymapbuilder.org MapBuilder]
| (45.27, -75.75)
| Contributor and member of MapBuilder PMC. Interested primarily in AJAX client technology for mapping, but also in the whole SDI stack. [[User:madair]]
|-
| Stefan F. Keller
| University of Applied Sciences Rapperswil (HSR), [http://www.ifs.hsr.ch Institute for Software]
| [http://webgis.hsr.ch/javawps JavaWPS]
| (47.2240, 8.8181)
| Promotor of open source and commercial technologies specially in the field of information retrieval, databases, GIS and visualization. Advocate of open and interoperability standards, member of national GIS standardization (e-geo, SNV) and umbrella (SOGI) organizations. Creator of [http://wwww.geometa.info geometa.info], one of the first search engines for geospatial services (WMS), metadata and online maps (Lucene-based); contributor of geo-webservices for german Wikipedia. [[User:Sfkeller]]
|-
| [[User:Arnulf Christl | Arnulf Christl]]
| [http://www.ccgis.de CCGIS], [http://www.geo-consortium.de Geo-Consortium]
| [http://www.mapbender.org Mapbender], [http://www.umn-mapserver.de UMN MapServer (Germany)], [http://board.osgeo.org Board], [http://visibilitycommittee.osgeo.org Promotion and Visibility Committee]
| (7.0707, 50.7342)
| Mapbender PSC, Promoter of [http://www.gnu.org Free Software] and [http://www.osi.org Open Source] :-) Business (...and Open Source Software!)
|-
|V.RaviKumar
|Geologist
|OSGeo member [http://freegis.gnu.org.in/grass_geosciencedataset.pdf],[''GRASS Indian exmple'']
| 17° N 79° E
| A Geologist from India who is interested in FOSS software. GRASS in particular. Conducted a FOSS workshop at Hyderabad, India in May 2005. The workshop boosted our spirits with a large participation and good articles on various FOSS software. An entire session was for GRASS, Qgis software. Presently lecturing in various forums on the capability of GRASS and allied FOSS GIS. With the help of Free Software Foundation India, trying to spread awareness of GRASS GIS, GNU-Linux and FOSS. Countries like India have a lot to gain with the spread of FOSS.
|-
|David Hastings
|UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, Bangkok
|Member of original Grass Interagency Steering Committee, etc.
| 13.75°N 100.5°E
| A physicist/geophysicist/geological engineer who has used GRASS since 1987, and on the GRASS Interagency Steering Committee for the original public-domain package. I wrote the Linux Mini-HOWTO on GRASS-GIS (which is now woefully out of date); and taught short courses in scientific (as opposed to cartographic) GIS since 1980. In 1994 I moved my teaching to the Web, developing the CyberInstitute Short-Course on GIS. Currently, I'm at UN ESCAP. Open-Source is a great capacity- building environment for software communities worldwide. In developing countries, rather than being stuck merely teaching people to cut and paste stuff within a proprietary office suite, you can be part of the full development team, customizing the software to your community's needs, helping your country to have its own software development community - and hopefully making a satisfying living in the process.
|-
| Gary Sherman
| [http://mrcc.com Micro Resources], [http://qgis.org Quantum GIS]
| OSGeo Member
| (-149.567, 61.32138)
| Consultant, "Father" of Quantum GIS, long-time Linux user and Open Source proponent.
|-
| Astrid Emde
| [http://www.mapbender.org Mapbender], MapServer, PostgreSQL/PostGIS
| Mapbender Development
| (7.0707, 50.7342)
| Projects with MapServer, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, Mapbender. Part of the Mapbender Developer Team. Courses for Mapbender, UMN MapServer, PostgreSQL/PostGIS and WMS, WFS
|-
| Jeroen Ticheler
| [http://geonetwork.sourceforge.net GeoNetwork opensource], [http://sourceforge.net/projects/intermap InterMap opensource], [http://www.fao.org/geonetwork Food and Agriculture Organization GeoNetwork]
| OSGeo member
| 42.07420°N, 12.34343°E
| I've initiated the development of the GeoNetwork opensource Spatial Data Catalog software and its embedded InterMap opensource Map Viewer. I hope to contribute possitively to the creation of a comprehensive, FOSS based toolkit for Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) that help people share and use geospatial data and information in an easy and cost effective way. I focus especially on the data sharing within the United Nations system and in countries under development. I promote free and open source software as an excellent option for more sustainable development in these countries, proving it works by applying and further developing it in my day to day work. [http://lists.eogeo.org/mailman/listinfo/opensdi OpenSDI] is a forum to discuss foss and cots integration.
|-
| Dirceu Machado
| [http://www.pti.org.br Itaipu Tecnology Park]
| OSGeo member,GRASS
| 59°S, -24°E
| I'm a brazilian developer of open source GIS/WEB_GIS applications using PHP, JAVA and Python with Mapserver and PostGIS and also a user and enthusiast of Linux and BSD's OS. I'm excited with the idea of a community like this one and i wish to help in any way i can with development's (if necessary) and/or documentation translations to portuguese language. Actualy i'm working in a project to develop a GIS viewer and map generator (for printing purposes) in Python based on the idea of the JUMP Project.
|-
| Kevin Yam
| [http://www.ene.gov.on.ca Ontario Ministry of the Environment], [http://www.lio.mnr.gov.on.ca, Land Information Ontario]
| OSGeo member
| 43.709, -79.544
| Program coordinator for information management within the Provinicial Ministry of the Environment. I focus especially on data sharing between government agencies, departments and local stakeholders, and I am a promoter of open source geospatial tools applicable to environmental monitoring and observing [[User:kevinyam]]
|-
| Colin Gowens
| Geographer, GIS Professional
| OSGeo member
| 33.7518, -84.3920
| User of GRASS, GDAL, OGR, PostGIS and Mapserver since 2002. The open source GIS software and community have proven tremendously valuable to my GIS endeavors.
|-
| David Bitner
| [http://maps.macnoise.com/interactive/, Metropolitan Airports Commission], Freelance
| OSGeo member
| 44.844, -93.560
| Active PostGIS and MapServer user. GIS application developer for airport authority and other freelance projects. Member of Geodata Workgroup. Serve on Regional/State committees (Minnesota) for Data Sharing and Enterprise Geospatial Architecture. Member of Twin Cities Mapserver Users Group.
|-
| Tyler Mitchell
| [http://spatialguru.com, Spatialguru.com], [http://timberline.ca, Timberline GIS]
| OSGeo Member, [http://visibilitycommittee.osgeo.org Promotion and Visibility Committee], [http://edu.osgeo.org Education Committee]
| 54, -121 (lat/lon)
| MapServer, PostGIS, GRASS, GDAL user. GIS Manager for production shop focused on natural resource management. [http://oreilly.com/catalog/webmapping, O'Reilly Author], writer, promoter of Open Source GIS.
|-
| Rafael Medeiros Sperb
| [http://www.univali.br, G10 - UNIVALI]
| OSGeo Member
| -26.60, -48.70 (lat/lon)
|-
| Steven M. Ottens
| [http://www.geodan.com/ Geodan]
| [http://communitymapbuilder.org MapBuilder]
| 52.34, 4.91 (lat/lon)
| Contributor and member of MapBuilder PMC. [[User:stvn]]
|-
| Stefano Maffulli
| Politecnico di Milano
| [http://visibilitycommittee.osgeo.org Promotion and Visibility Committee], [http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/International_Outreach International Outreach], [http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Public_Geospatial_Data_Project Public Geospatial Data]
| 45, 9 (Lat,Lon)
| Architect, worked within the GIS_Lab at University of Florence on research about sustainable development of historical cities. At Joint Research Center (Ispra) worked within the EU funded project [http://commongis.org CommonGIS]. Currently working with Politecnico di Milano as consultant on [http://www.corila.it/ Methodologies and technologies for conservation and restoration of historical Venetian buildings]
|-
| Dave Patton
| [http://members.shaw.ca/davepatton/ CIS Canadian Information Systems]
| helping the Website Committee
| 49.27N 123.15W
| Self-employed computer consultant. Co-lead developer for [http://punt.sourceforge.net/ Punt], an Open Source multi-language Windows desktop application that allows the user to view the terrain of any world in 3D. Canadian Coordinator and co-administrator of [http://www.confluence.org/index.php the Degree Confluence Project] [[User:Dpatton]]
|-
| Jody Garnett<br>[[User:Jive]]
| [http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/Home GeoTools]
| Iccubation and limited Website Committee
| missing
| It seems all I do is email, must be due to [http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/Home GeoTools], [http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOS/Home GeoServer], [http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEO/Home GeoAPI] and [http://udig.refractions.net uDig]. I am working at [http://www.refractions.net/ Refractions Research, Inc], a small consulting company with an open source habit.
|-
| Justin Deoliveira
| [http://topp.openplans.org The Open Planning Project], [http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/Home GeoTools], [http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOS/Home GeoServer]
| [http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/Home GeoTools]
| undeterministic
| [http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOTOOLS/Home GeoTools] module maintainer, [http://docs.codehaus.org/display/GEOS/Home GeoServer] developer, and [http://udig.refractions.net uDig] committer. I have been kicking around the Java GIS world for approximately 3 years contributing as an active developer on said projects. For the last year or so I have been working for a non-profit company known as [http://topp.openplans.org The Open Planning Project].
|
|-
| Dylan Beaudette
| [http://casoilresource.lawr.ucdavis.edu/drupal/node/38 UCD]
| GRASS
| Input lat/long here
| Soils and Biogeochemistry M.S. student at University of California, Davis. Interested in the use and proliferation of OSS in the sciences, particularly soil science. GIS and geomorphologic analysis; presentation of USDA-NCSS digital soil survey information / soils education through visual example.
|-
| Stuart Eve
| [http://www.lparchaeology.com L - P : Archaeology]
| Mapserver (user), GRASS (user)
| Input lat/long here
| Involved in using web-based Open Source technologies to make archaeological data accessible to a wider audience. We use Mapserver in a number of applications, including [http://www.fastionline.org Fasti Online]
|-
| [[User:Pmarc | Paulo Marcondes]]
| [http://www.marcondes.org marcondes.org], [http://hamstuff.blogspot.com Blog]
| [http://grass.itc.it GRASS] (translator), OSGeo Member (?), [[Brasil | OSGeo Brasil]] (proponent)
| (-22.915,-42.229), Maidenhead: GG87vc
| Working in the GRASS translation to portuguese (pt_br), somewhat involved (at least intelecutally) with Debian-GIS, involved in the local Debian User Group. My interests range from everything spatial to everything geospatial, GIS, GPS, Ham Radio, wardriving, etc. I have a B.S. in Geology (2001) Universidade de São Paulo, Brasil. I do R&D in the oil industry in a non GIS arena, but plan migrating to the GIS arena in the near future. I'm also planning a M.S. in GIS sometime in the future (accepting suggestions).
I would like to see free software adopted everywhere. I don't dislike proprietary software per se, but the attitude it usually inspires.
|-
| [[User:anselm | Anselm Hook]]
| [http://hook.org hook.org], [http://maps.civicactions.net maps.civicactions.net] [http://placedb.org placedb]
|
| (-122.673,-45.5371), Portland Oregon
| Both commercial and open source developer. Led engineering for platial.com and wrote placedb.org - also wrote maps.civicactions.net (an ajax tile map engine with a dataset behind it). Also wrote a small java spinny globe at [http://hook.org/headmap headmap]. Interested in providing fully open source map data (not simply applications or tools but actual content). Primarily interested in social and environmental issues with an eye towards modelling near term outcomes of decision making.
|-
| Oscar Cantán
| University of Zaragoza, Spain
| Member
| (41.666,-0.888)
| Currently working on the development and implementation of geospatial interoperability standards. Specially interested in OGC catalog services specification (CSW, SRW) and metadata content standards (ISO 19119-19139).
|-
| Lorenzo Becchi
| http://www.ominiverdi.org
| OSGeo Member
| moving
| ka-Map developer. User:[[User:Ominiverdi|Ominiverdi]]
|-
| Christoph Baudson
| http://www.mapbender.org
| OSGeo Member
| here, there and everywhere
| Mapbender developer. See [[User:christoph|Christoph]]
|-
| Georg Lösel
| http://www.grass-verein.de GRASS-Anwender-Vereinigung
| User (GRASS, QGIS); Free Geodata
| 52,3625/9,7481
| [[User:Georgloesel|Georg Lösel]]
|-
| Reinhard Simon
| [http://www.cipotato.org [International Potato Center, Lima, Peru]
| Project lead: [http://research.cip.cgiar.org/confluence/display/divagis/Home DIVA-GIS]
| NA
| [[User:rsimon|Reinhard Simon]]
|-
| Todd Jamison
| http://www.observera.com
| OSGEO Member; User: OSSIM, GDAL, MapServer; Contributor: OSSIM
| (38.898489, -77.500484)
| Chief Image Scientist and CEO of Observera, Inc. Observera worked on the original OSSIM library with ImageLinks and we have developed several projects using the OSSIM library and MapServer, including ALLEGRO (Land-cover / Land-use Classification) and the Change Detection WorkStation (CDWS), both for the US Army. Expertise includes spectral, thermal, microwave sensors, photogrammetry, image registration, image processing, morphology, resolution enhancement, workflow automation, machine learning (e.g., neural nets, support vector machines, genetic algorithms), Geologic GIS and bunches of other stuff. Glad to be a part of OSGEO.
|-
| Laurent Jégou
| [http://www.univ-tlse2.fr/geoprdc UTM Dept. Géo], [http://www.forumsig.org Forum SIG], [http://www.portailsig.org Portail SIG]
| User and wanabee [http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Core_Curriculum_Project Curriculum project] contributor.
| (43.6N, 1.4E)
| Cartographer (conception, production, integration), cartography and GIS teacher for masters degrees, open source mapping software developper (.Net and Java), technology developpement monitoring.
|-
| Gary Watry
| [http://www.coaps.fsu.edu[Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies - Florida State University]
| NA
| (30.42277,-84.32370)
| [[User:Gary Watry]]
|-

All Members

2006-08-11T16:44:19Z

Wiki-Watry:

OSGeo education interested participants

2006-03-27T12:17:07Z

Wiki-Watry:

See the [[Education_and_Curriculum_Committee]] page for the list of initial committee members.

The following are individuals who have self-identified themselves as interested in contributing or assisting with [[Education_and_Curriculum_Committee]] projects. You are welcome to add yourself to the list and identify areas that you are particular familiar with or interested in contributing to.

* [[User:Punkish | Puneet Kishor]] (chair) (TZ GMT-6)
* Ari Jolma (TZ GMT-2)
* [[User:Neteler | Markus Neteler ]] (TZ GMT-1) (general training/education materials; educational datasets)
* Venkatesh Raghavan
* Charlie Schweik (undergraduate and graduate level education; academic research on open source collaboration, public sector information technology, natural resource management)
* Pericles Nacionales (general training/education materials; conservation and natural resource management)
* Ned Horning
* [[User:Tmitchel | Tyler Mitchell]] (TZ GMT-8) (interested in workshop material and curriculum development for high school through to university)
* Gary Watry (TZ GMT-5)(Interested in using Free Open Source Software (FOSS) to replace teaching Commercial Off The Shelf Software (COTS)in education, Preparing material for course work at the Graduate and Under-Grad level and then moving down into the High School level through AP and Honors courses.)
* [[User:Arnulf Christl]] (TZ GMT-1) (Experience as GIS instructor for fulltime workshops, trainings and courses. Organization of commercial training courses with Open Source Geospatial Software. Preparation of course and presentation material, tutorials). (Interest in enhancing presentation material, publishing under Free license, in time hardcopy production, maintenance and update of content just as any OS dev project)

OSGeo education interested participants

2006-03-27T12:15:30Z

Wiki-Watry:

See the [[Education_and_Curriculum_Committee]] page for the list of initial committee members.

The following are individuals who have self-identified themselves as interested in contributing or assisting with [[Education_and_Curriculum_Committee]] projects. You are welcome to add yourself to the list and identify areas that you are particular familiar with or interested in contributing to.

* [[User:Punkish | Puneet Kishor]] (chair) (TZ GMT-6)
* Ari Jolma (TZ GMT-2)
* [[User:Neteler | Markus Neteler ]] (TZ GMT-1) (general training/education materials; educational datasets)
* Venkatesh Raghavan
* Charlie Schweik (undergraduate and graduate level education; academic research on open source collaboration, public sector information technology, natural resource management)
* Pericles Nacionales (general training/education materials; conservation and natural resource management)
* Ned Horning
* [[User:Tmitchel | Tyler Mitchell]] (TZ GMT-8) (interested in workshop material and curriculum development for high school through to university)
* Gary Watry (TZ GMT+5)(Interested in using Free Open Source Software (FOSS) to replace teaching Commercial Off The Shelf Software (COTS)in education, Preparing material for course work at the Graduate and Under-Grad level and then moving down into the High School level through AP and Honors courses.)
* [[User:Arnulf Christl]] (TZ GMT-1) (Experience as GIS instructor for fulltime workshops, trainings and courses. Organization of commercial training courses with Open Source Geospatial Software. Preparation of course and presentation material, tutorials). (Interest in enhancing presentation material, publishing under Free license, in time hardcopy production, maintenance and update of content just as any OS dev project)

OSGeo education interested participants

2006-03-26T13:52:43Z

Wiki-Watry:

See the [[Education_and_Curriculum_Committee]] page for the list of initial committee members.

The following are individuals who have self-identified themselves as interested in contributing or assisting with [[Education_and_Curriculum_Committee]] projects. You are welcome to add yourself to the list and identify areas that you are particular familiar with or interested in contributing to.

* [[User:Punkish | Puneet Kishor]] (chair)
* Ari Jolma
* Markus Neteler
* Venkatesh Raghavan
* Charlie Schweik (undergraduate and graduate level education; academic research on open source collaboration, public sector information technology, natural resource management)
* Pericles Nacionales (general training/education materials; conservation and natural resource management)
* Ned Horning
* Helena Mitasova (graduate level education MS, PhD; academic research)
* Tyler Mitchell (interested in workshop material and curriculum development for high school through to university)
* Gary Watry (Interested in using Free Open Source Software (FOSS) to replace teaching Commercial Off The Shelf Software (COTS)in education, Preparing material for course work at the Graduate and Under-Grad level and then moving down into the High School level through AP and Honors courses.)

Core Curriculum Project

2006-03-26T00:37:21Z

Wiki-Watry:

''This project might be renamed to "Educational & Curriculum" or "Educational Outreach" or "Learning Resources on GIS".''

The project is now officially approved as [[Education and Curriculum Committee]].

== Mission ==

The project aims at creating and promoting curriculum material that supports the goals of the Foundation. The intent is to provide material that is accessible by a broad audience including academia, professionals, and the general public. Material supported through this project should directly or indirectly build and strengthen the open source geospatial user and developer communities. This can be accomplished by integrating the use of OSGeo endorsed tools in curricula that teach geospatial concepts and applications as well as the creating curricula to teach skills necessary for people to actively participate in supported OSGeo software and data projects.

== Approach ==

The project is now officially approved as [[Education and Curriculum Committee]].

=== Dimensions of this project ===

This could be a kind of wizard, the person interested (teacher or somebody seeking education
for him/herself) clicks three times based on selections along these axis and is presented
materials and links, which should be useful for him/her. There should be material for both preparing for the teaching/learning and for actually carrying out the teaching/learning. Material of the first type includes instructions to install software etc. thus there are links to tasks of other OSGeo projects. Data, licencing, and some other issues are also things that need to be covered material by material.

The current number of slots is 1242 (9x23x6) :-)

# type of education
# content of the education
# method of teaching/learning

==== type of education ====

* primary school (students are 7-12 years old)
* secondary school (students are 13-15 years old)
* high school (students are 16-18 years old)
* vocational college
* university, bachelor level
* university, masters level
* university, doctoral level
* continuing education (students have a college or university degree and work experience)
* vocational education (students do not have a college or university degree but they have work experience)

==== content of the education ====

These could be divided into two main categories according
to main viewpoint: applied or core geoinformatics.

* a subject from trad. geosciences, not modeling
* a subject from trad. geosciences, involving modeling
* subject from application area, spatial planning
* subject from application area, development studies
* subject from application area, biology, ecology, etc.
* subject from application area, forestry
* subject from application area, civil engineering
* subject from application area, military
* subject from application area, rescue, etc.
* geospatial databases
* geospatial visualization
* geospatial algorithms
* geospatial statistics
* geospatial simulation
* development of geospatial information systems, analysis
* development of geospatial information systems, design
* development of geospatial information systems, actual development
* development of geospatial information systems, implementation
* development of geospatial information systems, evaluation
* geospatial software development, <insert language>
* geospatial software development, for desktop
* geospatial software development, for web, server side
* geospatial software development, for web, client side

==== method of teaching/learning ====

* lecture
* demonstration
* interactive workshop
* self-learning, reading
* self-learning, using software
* self-learning, project work

== Links to other OSGeo efforts ==

Since teaching GIS is related to GIS data, the collaboration with [http://geodata.osgeo.org Public Geospatial Data Committee] is desired, in particular with the [[Geodata Packaging Working Group]].

== Licensing of teaching material ==

The material developed here needs to be appropriately licensed.
[http://creativecommons.org Creative Commons] licenses come to mind. This will be worked out once the committee is established.

== Comments ==

=== Comment on Wiki Communication Format ===
[[User:Arnulf Christl | I]] am very happy that this discussion did not yet dissolve into a mailing list. I strongly believe that we should try to keep it in Wiki-style as long as possible. It is a lot easier to get an overview of what is going on this way. For more specific and short term notices one(!) mailing list will be good for sure, but especially for longer term development this Wiki will be more valuable.

=== Project Comments ===

* Ned Horning's comments [[Some_comments|are here]].

* From Helena Mitasova
I read Ned comments - if you look at NCGIA Core Curriculum, it is very broad, so I suggest to keep at least the word Curriculum there (drop Core)--if we want to stress education in general, how about calling it Education and Curriculum Project. It would be great if we could build a curriculum that people who teach at universities and colleges could use to build OSGEO courses and programs (NCGIA curriculum linked in
the docuemnt is a good example). For example, if I had to teach geospatial analysis using GRASS, I am OK, but if I wanted to include a section about Mapserver a curriculum section prepared by somebody who has a lot of experience with it would be a great help.

* From Charlie Schweik
Since I am new to this group and have been introduced via my email address, for the group's information let me give you a short status on what I am up to. I am a faculty at University of Massachusetts, Amherst in the Department of Natural Resources Conservation. Right now I have two part-time students helping me develop some tutorials on Q-GIS. I have been teaching an Intro to GIS course for some time but am
relatively new to OS GIS products, so I'll be learning. I am planning on offering in April-May sessions to my students an overview to Q-GIS, and then some tutorials on fundamentals like georeferencing a scanned map, online digitizing, getting GPS data overlaid, etc. I see this as an entry point toward the use of GRASS. My ultimate goal over the next 6-8 months is to have some kind of distance learning material developed for use in an "Intro to OS GIS" online course offered out of my institution next Spring 2007. Having done research in Nepal for several years, part of my motivation for doing this was to help my colleagues there who desperately need GIS but face serious budgetary problems. I am not exactly sure how this will work under the context of my University's distance learning program. But I am a great proponent of open access and hope to use some kind of open content license (e.g., creativecommons.org) and see great value in helping move this project forward by contributing the material here to this broader educational effort. I need to see what kinds of requirements my university has related to material and an "official" online course that might get in the way of this vision. I had always envisioned making my material available somehow (e.g., MIT Open Courseware, FreeGIS.org, etc.) so the establishment of this OSGeo Curriculum and Education project is exciting to me. In short, I hope I can figure out how to use what I am doing to help this project and perhaps through this effort whatever we develop can be improved by the community here.

* From Ari Jolma
Gary Watry from FSU has prepared a 65 page Quantum GIS tutorial, which could be useful, at least duplicate work should be avoided. I got it from him directly, as far as I know it is not yet on the web.

Concerning the curriculum and education project in general. I think we don't want to do something similar as NCGIA website, which, by the way, is not linked to any specific software as far as I see.

I try to be inpartial in my teaching, which is often difficult in this field and may lead to confusion on the students part sometimes on software issues. I also try to teach theory as opposed to practical use of software. So I have problems trying to figure out what is it that we should produce. I think tutorials like Gary's are good. Another good idea could be complete worked out examples, which the students can re-do, perhaps on their own time (distance learning) or without too much tutoring in a computer classroom. I've done a few like that (for example non-point source modeling and travel time analysis) but they still need quite a lot of tutoring. One problem I have is that as the software develops so fast (and I've used mostly my own..) the procedure changes slightly from year to year.

Using free tools in distance learning is really good because students can freely install their own copies of the software. On the other hand, for example my software is currently Linux-only, so it is not practical with many people. => There's a common interest with the OSGeo project creating installation packages.

I'd like to have some sort of timetable and agreed ways of working: mostly email or mostly wiki?

* From Gary Watry (Florida State University)watry@coaps.fsu.edu
I have been tasked by my boss to put together a set of tutorials on different open source GIS software packages for Grad and Post-Doc Students. I have completed Quantum GIS (QGIS), am working on uDig, then will do MapWindow, Diva-GIS, etc. I want to put all the software tutorials into the same format (Similar to QGIS). Eventually Iwould like to see it added as a distant learning course at FSU. The course work is currently going to several different University Faculties as well as here at FSU. It is also going to over 70 individuals around the world (North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Asia). I have already talked to someone at OSGeo and they said that they would host a copy of all the tutorials as well as a FSU Site when I get it built.

* From Helena Mitasova (in response to Charlie)
My idea in that respect was to use it to outline what to teach in different units (that is what NCGIA does) and then link to it a material that shows how to do it in a specific software using selected data. So for example we can have a unit on DEMs and topographic analysis
- the Curriculum will outline what is included under that unit and that can then be linked to several materials:
- general theory including equations and algorithms (this can be just a link to a relevant chapter in FreeGISBook)
- teaching material for use with GRASS
- teaching material for use with SAGA
- whatever else will people contribute to support this unit.

In this way we can minimize redundancy, cover number of different software packages and it will have an additional benefit that you can compare and see what would be the best for the class - e.g. topoanalysis in one package maybe more suited for natural resources students a different one would be better for computer science.

* From Prof. Venkatesh Raghavan
I think Curriculum, Education and Capacity Building initiatives
related to OSGEO could be broken down to three (or more) phases

;Phase 1 Short term (six months)
:a) Assimilation of existing tutorial, lecture notes, training documents, presentations that are available or could be made available under Open Document or Creative Commons License.

:b) Discuss how Curriculum can be structured with existing resources. Identify gaps for developing new material.

;Phase 2 Medium term (one year)
:a) Setup a e-learning portal (www.moodle.org) to manage existing course material and obtain user feedback. Have been experimenting with Moodle recently and we are trying to put together a online training course based on some of the material that we developed earlier. Could help with hosting a Moodle site if necessary (http://wgrass.media.osaka-cu.ac.jp/elearn/)

:b) Develop multi-media contents (animations, screen casting), data set for tutorial etc to facilitate self-learning.

;Phase 3 Long term (two three years)

:a) Develop standardized mechanism for testing (question banks, quiz, assignments etc). Moodle is quite good for this purpose

:b) Translation to local language and collection of datasets for geographic locations some language locales. Working with datasets that the candidate is familiar with can make learning easier.

:c) Initial review and improvement of contents and possible establishment of OSGEO Virtual University to cater to education, testing and certification of OSGEO Engineer.

* From Prof. Venkatesh Raghavan
We had discussed issues about Accredited Professional training before, I reproduce some of the thoughts below.
An OSGEO-CE (OSGEO- Certified Engineer), something in the lines of, PostgreSQL-CE, RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer). Having a OSGEO with tie-ups to some Universities,Academic societies, Industry, that could

a) design and market courseware and educational material
b) assure quality
c) provide accreditation to institutions that will start the course and also training to instructors at such institutes.
d) Evolve standardized mechanism for testing and certificate of candidates
c) Issue acrredited certification to successful candidates and provide placement counseling.

I think there is a market for such packaged educational and career solutions at least in Asia. I know of at least a few institutes in Aiaa that have been set-up during the last two years and have successfully (at least in term of candidate intake, the course content leaves a lot to be desired) implemented similar business model for proprietary Geoinfomrtics solutions.

Among numerous benefits that such a initiative would bring about, the one most important would be that it would help generate a pool of qualified professionals and developer who could in turn enrich the OSGEO Community.

Some additional thoughts and info about Professional Certification for OSGEO

a) A Japanese company started a Professional certification for PostgreSQL since 1st March 2005.
Details about the Certification are available at http://osb.sra.co.jp/postgresqlce/about_en.html
The testing is managed by Pearson VUE(http://www.vue.com/).
Details are available at http://www.vue.com/sra/ As per http://osb.sra.co.jp/postgresql-ce/news_en.html#20050224

b)Linux Professional Certification (http://www.lpi.org/en/home.html) offers accredited training and conducts training thru LPI approved training center the worldover. Candidates can register to take LPI exams at Pearson VUE testing centres worldwide(http://www.vue.com/) and Thomson Prometric (http://securereg3.prometric.com/Welcome.aspx) "LPI holds special exam labs at major Linux and IT tradeshows and conferences around the world, often offering LPI certification exams for substantially reduced pricing or in some cases free of cost."

c) Bradford Learning (http://www.bradfordlearning.com/en/start_page.php)
also offers LPI certification apart from various others including
apache, samba, mysql etc.

d) Some other listed as LPI sponsors (http://www.lpi.org/en/sponsors.html) also offer/manage Professional certification

* From David Hastings

I wonder if existing core curricula could be considered as relatively adequate (unless a further assessment determines otherwise). On the other hand, educational/training support for OSS has generally received bad press - and this group could help make considerable progress on that front.

I don't fully agree with the bad press about OSS support. Indeed, I seem to remember that Info World gave Red Hat Linux an award several years back for its support services - partly to counter that bad press. I personally found extensive support when I first used GRASS (in 1987), first became a GRASS system manager (in 1988), first installed Linux and put GRASS on my first dual-boot PC (in 1994), first stumbled across file-level interoperability between two GISs (1995, between GRASS and Idrisi byte data files), etc. Much support has been virtual, through searches of discussion group archives.

Nevertheless, training support for OSS GIS could be stronger. I think this could be the greatest challenge, and opportunity, in the educational arena for an Open-Source Geospatial Foundation.

My attempt to answer this during 1994-2002 was the CyberInstitute Short-Course in GIS, which ran additionally until sometime last year, 3 years after I departed Boulder for Bangkok and the UN. I think that such a general approach, strengthened by the ideas and circumstances of this Foundation, could be a useful piece in the puzzle of OSS educational/training support.

Implementation of something like the CyberInstitute Short-Course could be part of Venka's outline item 1b in his discussion on implementation phases (2 discussions above this one). I'd suggest that the name (CyberInstitute Short-Course) be considered for continuation, as it gained a bit of respect over the decade-plus that it ran on the NOAA/NGDC Website.

Please see my additional comments on the discussion page.

* From Venkatesh Raghavan

a) What are the objectives of the Core Curriculum?

The main focus would be on providing a solid foundation on Geoinformatics technology using OSGEO tools as a means of education and self-learning.

b) Who will be the actual customer to adopt the core curriculum would it be the institution or organisation which would ultimately employ our graduates?

We can think of regular and corporate sponsored training. Also focus on tailor-made courses. Direct marketing to potential clients would require lot of efforts. Maybe we need to think of providing packaged educational solutions (franchising) to institutions and universities.

c) Which kind of institutions/companies would employ OSGEO Prodessionals?

Geoinformatics industry, Government Institutions, NPO, NGO, Self-employed, Geo-contents service providers etc.

d) What would be the entry strategy? Will it be with high end courses or low end courses – i.e. in terms of pricing, content, etc?

We have to see what is presently available and at what cost. Most of info available from Google Search are summarized at http://www.institute.redlands.edu/kemp/certificates.html#Related. Details of two institutions presently offering courses in India are http://www.gisinstitute.net/upcoming.asp?id=27 http://www.mapmiddleeast.org/2006/conference/training.htm and http://www.symbiosis.ac.in/sig/course.htm. One example from Thailand is available at http://www.gac.ait.ac.th/training/catalog.php. Pricing info at these sites could be serve as reference in the Asian context. The course contents have to be decided after more discussions. I think the course should be modular introduced in a phased manner 6-8 weeks

Level 1: Introduction to GIS and Web Mapping Technologies: Basically how to install, use, producing maps using OSGEO tools. Completion of this level could result in certification as “XXXYYY Certified Application User”

Level 2: Geo-spatial Database Development: Open data standards, GML, Remote Sensing, GPS, mobile GIS, RDBMS. Completion of this level could result in certification as “XXXYYY Certified Spatial Database Manager”

Level 3: Advanced Module for Application Developers: Spatial data analysis using GRASS, Web GIS application development,using Mapserver Script languages, PHP, Javascript, Python. Completion of this level could result in certification as “XXXYYY Certified Application Developer”

Level 4: Advanced Module for Software Developers Developing Geoinformatics software and cross-platform GIS solutions e.g. GRASS Programing & Libraries, Data Exchange Libraries, C programming, Qt, Python, Plug-in development for QGIS. Software packaging (RPM etc.) Completion of this level will result in certification as “XXXYYY Certified Geoinfromatics Engineer”

Option to get a Master degree after completion for 4 Levels and conducting project research (in 16 to 18 weeks) could also be considered at a later stage.

* From [[User:Arnulf Christl | Arnulf Christl]]
Seems like there is not much input from commercial organisations yet, so I might just add some thoughts. We have founded the [http://www.geo-consortium.de Geo-Consortium] several years ago and built a curriculum for the Open Source SOA OGC standarized SDI Stack that most of our customers (WebGIS and SDI) need. This is a highly compressed approach, we hammer the required information into the brains within a very short time for a very high amount of money). So this differs highly from the universitarian long term learning curve model. Is this kind of ad hoc learning/training relevant in the context of this Core Curriculum / Educational approach? If yes we are willing to contribute with presentations and learning material which is designed to take a software stack and get going asap.

I will need to talk to the document contributors who until now have managed to efficiently prevent me from putting everything under GNU FDL for reasons of market leadership - the idea/fear being that freely available material will lessen the need of people to actually pay (lots) for courses which is the main revenue generated by the Geo-Consortium. It is my opinion the leraning material itself without a trainer is not enough to get things done in as short a time as one week, also regarding that you need a running hardware infrastructure, etc. So it would not harm to make the material available for secondary use in universitarian courses. But I must explain this to my contributors, not you... :-)

* From [[User:Pnaciona | Perry Nacionales]]
I tend to agree with both Arnulf and Prof. Raghavan in that we have two general kinds of audience--those who are in "formal" academia and those who are already in the professional fields trying to expand their knowledge. The latter require something that won't take a lot of their time--the materials they require could be dense/packed but it shouldn't take more than a week (or a day!) to complete (it could be a series of intense but short seminars). The former will of course need something that lasts an entire school term. These two general categories can be further broken into finer subcategories and most comments address that already. It would be nice if someone can summarize these comments and present this as a proposal for a curriculum/outreach committee... I'm partial to just calling this Education and Outreach Committee. :)

A couple other things... there's an overlap between this committee/project and the visibility committee and we ought to collaborate with that group in the areas where our aims meet. We should also promote the use of open geospatial data and should work with the [[Public_Geospatial_Data_Committee | Public Geospatial Data Committee]] group for our data needs.

* From Brandon Plewe
OSGEO does not need (nor is in a strong position) to create a curriculum. There are plenty of initiatives already existing to do that (if anything, it's already a bit diluted), such as the [http://www.ucgis.org/priorities/education/modelcurriculaproject.asp UCGIS GIS&T Body of Knowledge]. What OSGEO should be doing is developing teaching/learning materials (labs, tutorials, datasets) that are aligned with these curricula, documenting connections between the general knowledge and OS technical solutions (e.g., "This skill can be performed with GRASS, this one with mapserver"), and getting involved in existing initiatives to make sure that they fairly consider open source solutions. For example, in the UCGIS initiative, we had to do a lot of work at the end to take out vendorese language and include things like mapping hacks.

* From [[User:Punkish | Puneet Kishor]]
I have been reading all the stuff posted on the wiki thus far. Lots of good stuff there. Like others who have tried to grapple with this, we have to be very clear about what we are trying to do. From the thoughts expressed thus far, the following possible objectives emerge --

1. Promote understanding of GIS (I use GIS to encompass not just the software but also the related academic fields of geography, geodesy, geoinformatics, GI Science, and complementary fields of computer science, planning, statistics, whathaveyou). The academia already does so, mostly very well, and with a lot of recognition and financial and institutional backing. The danger in us doing this is that we come off as a diluted version of rigorous academic training, sort of a lesser alternative.

2. Promote open source. The entire open source world does so, mostly very well, and with a lot of recognition, and some financial and institutional backing. The danger in us doing this is that we come off as motivated by some wayward zeal, clubbed with other anti-corporate sentiments.

3. Promote the role of open source in GIS. This is where the committee and the community can play a valuable role. This can be done in various ways -- showcasing innovative projects, building collaborative partnerships with academia, convincing them to use open source tools for GIS education in their classrooms, providing packaged tools and datasets for consumption, and encouraging, suggesting, perhaps even making possible research on and using open source GIS.

I am personally not too sure about certification. The GIS Certification Institute [http://www.gisci.org/ GIS CI] is working in this area, but I feel certification tool-ifies the field, makes it more mechanical, a skill to be mastered rather than a subject to be explored.

Anyway, lots to think about. Thanks again for giving me the opportunity to work with you all on this. By the way, ecogs.osgeo.org is a possible website name for this committee (education curriculum open geo spatial)

== Potential Members ==
''If you add people/orgs to this list, please indicate whether you're adding yourself/your organization or whether you are "nominating" the person/organization as a potential member.''

=== Individuals ===
* Scott Emmons (added by Tyler): University of Northern British Columbia - emmons at unbc.ca.
* Ned Horning (added by self): American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation horning@amnh.org [http://www.geospatial.amnh.org www.geospatial.amnh.org]
* Ari Jolma (added by self): Helsinki University of Technology, Finland ari.jolma at tkk.fi
* Puneet Kishor (added by self): punkish at eidesis dot org; GeoAnalytics, Inc., soon to join [http://www.wisc.edu Univ of Wisconsin - Madison]
* Tyler Mitchell (added by markusN): Author of Web Mapping Illustrated [http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/webmapping]. Seminars at local schools: University of Northern British Columbia, Canada [http://gis.unbc.ca] and College of New Caledonia, Canada [http://cnc.bc.ca]. Email tylermitchell at shaw.ca.
* Helena Mitasova (added by self): North Carolina State University, hmitaso@unity.ncsu.edu [http://skagit.meas.ncsu.edu/~helena/]
* Pericles Nacionales (added by self): University of Minnesota, naci0002 at umn dot edu
* Matthew Perry (added by self): University of California, Santa Barbara, perrygeo at gmail dot com
* Shaun Walbridge (added by self): University of California, Santa Barbara, walbridge at nceas.ucsb.edu
* Charlie Schweik (added by self): University of Massachusetts, Amherst, cschweik at pubpol dot umass dot edu [http://people.umass.edu/cschweik people.umass.edu/cschweik]
* Ian Turton (added by self): Penn State Uni, State College, developed Open Web Mapping course at Uni of Leeds, UK [http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/courses/postgrad/geog5780/] now modifying it for PennState. ianturton at gmail com [http://www.geovista.psu.edu/members/turton/index.html work] [http://pennspace.blogspot.com/ blog]
* Venkatesh Raghavan (added by self): Osaka City University, Japan raghavan at .media.osaka-cu.ac.jp
* Aaron Racicot (added by self): Ecotrust, Portland Oregon USA - aaronr at ecotrust.org
* David Hastings (added by self): United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, email hastingsd at un.org
* Arnulf Christl (added by self): Geo-Consortium Training Services
* Gary Watry (added by Self)Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies - The Florida State University, watry@coaps.fsu.edu
=== Organizations ===

* 52North (added by Andreas Wytzisk): http://www.52north.org

== Existing Work ==

* [http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/giscc/ The NCGIA Core Curriculum in GIScience]
* [http://www.ucgis.org/priorities/education/modelcurriculaproject.asp The UCGIS Model Curricula Project], including the GIS&T Body of Knowledge, the most comprehensive attempt yet at classifying GIS knowledge
* [http://www.r-s-c-c.org/ Remote Sensing Core Curriculum]
* [http://geoworkforce.olemiss.edu/ IAEGS Curriculum], University of Mississippi, primarily focused on Remote Sensing
* [http://www.usgif.org/content.asp?pl=455&contentid=460 USGIF Academic Committee], aiming to accredit programs for Geospatial Intelligence
* [http://www.gisci.org/ GIS Certification Institute], creating standards for certified GIS Professionals
* [http://www.asprs.org/membership/certification/ ASPRS Certification Programs], including GIS
* [http://people.umass.edu/cschweik/research.html C. Schweik: 2005-2010. NSF CAREER Grant. “The Open Source/Content Commons as a New Paradigm for Collaborative Scientific Research: A Research and Teaching Agenda.”] - MN had some personal conversation at OSG'05
* [http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/courses/postgrad/geog5780/ Open Web Mapping course] - Ian Turton, this is under the creative commons despite living on a University web site, I just haven't got a good new home for it yet.
* D. Hastings, 1994 et seq., The CyberInstitute Short-Course on Geographic Information Systems. Formerly hosted at http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov. Now archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20040221110141/www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/tools/gis/referenc.shtml

== GFOSS Books ==

* S. Erle, R. Gibson, and J. Walsh, 2005, Mapping Hacks. O'Reilly Media, Inc., 564 pages, ISBN 0596007035, http://mappinghacks.com

* S. Erle and R. Gibson, 2006, Google Maps Hacks. O'Reilly Media, Inc., 366 pages, ISBN: 0-596-10161-9, http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/googlemapshks/

* B. Kropla, 2005, Beginning MapServer: Open Source GIS Development (Expert's Voice in Open Source). Apress, 448 pages, ISBN 1590594908, http://www.apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=443

* T. Mitchell, 2005, Web Mapping Illustrated: Using Open Source GIS Toolkits. O'Reilly Media, Inc., 367 pages, ISBN 0596008651, http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/webmapping/

* M. Neteler and H. Mitasova, 2004, Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach. 2nd Ed. Kluwer Academic Publishers/Springer, Boston. 424 pages, ISBN 1402080646, http://mpa.itc.it/grasstutor/index.phtml

Core Curriculum Project

2006-03-25T02:35:45Z

Wiki-Watry: /* Project Comments */

''This project might be renamed to "Educational & Curriculum" or "Educational Outreach" or "Learning Resources on GIS".''

The project is now officially approved as [[Education and Curriculum Committee]].

== Mission ==

The project aims at creating and promoting curriculum material that supports the goals of the Foundation. The intent is to provide material that is accessible by a broad audience including academia, professionals, and the general public. Material supported through this project should directly or indirectly build and strengthen the open source geospatial user and developer communities. This can be accomplished by integrating the use of OSGeo endorsed tools in curricula that teach geospatial concepts and applications as well as the creating curricula to teach skills necessary for people to actively participate in supported OSGeo software and data projects.

== Approach ==

The project is now officially approved as [[Education and Curriculum Committee]].

=== Dimensions of this project ===

This could be a kind of wizard, the person interested (teacher or somebody seeking education
for him/herself) clicks three times based on selections along these axis and is presented
materials and links, which should be useful for him/her. There should be material for both preparing for the teaching/learning and for actually carrying out the teaching/learning. Material of the first type includes instructions to install software etc. thus there are links to tasks of other OSGeo projects. Data, licencing, and some other issues are also things that need to be covered material by material.

The current number of slots is 1242 (9x23x6) :-)

# type of education
# content of the education
# method of teaching/learning

==== type of education ====

* primary school (students are 7-12 years old)
* secondary school (students are 13-15 years old)
* high school (students are 16-18 years old)
* vocational college
* university, bachelor level
* university, masters level
* university, doctoral level
* continuing education (students have a college or university degree and work experience)
* vocational education (students do not have a college or university degree but they have work experience)

==== content of the education ====

These could be divided into two main categories according
to main viewpoint: applied or core geoinformatics.

* a subject from trad. geosciences, not modeling
* a subject from trad. geosciences, involving modeling
* subject from application area, spatial planning
* subject from application area, development studies
* subject from application area, biology, ecology, etc.
* subject from application area, forestry
* subject from application area, civil engineering
* subject from application area, military
* subject from application area, rescue, etc.
* geospatial databases
* geospatial visualization
* geospatial algorithms
* geospatial statistics
* geospatial simulation
* development of geospatial information systems, analysis
* development of geospatial information systems, design
* development of geospatial information systems, actual development
* development of geospatial information systems, implementation
* development of geospatial information systems, evaluation
* geospatial software development, <insert language>
* geospatial software development, for desktop
* geospatial software development, for web, server side
* geospatial software development, for web, client side

==== method of teaching/learning ====

* lecture
* demonstration
* interactive workshop
* self-learning, reading
* self-learning, using software
* self-learning, project work

== Links to other OSGeo efforts ==

Since teaching GIS is related to GIS data, the collaboration with [http://geodata.osgeo.org Public Geospatial Data Committee] is desired, in particular with the [[Geodata Packaging Working Group]].

== Licensing of teaching material ==

The material developed here needs to be appropriately licensed.
[http://creativecommons.org Creative Commons] licenses come to mind. This will be worked out once the committee is established.

== Comments ==

=== Comment on Wiki Communication Format ===
[[User:Arnulf Christl | I]] am very happy that this discussion did not yet dissolve into a mailing list. I strongly believe that we should try to keep it in Wiki-style as long as possible. It is a lot easier to get an overview of what is going on this way. For more specific and short term notices one(!) mailing list will be good for sure, but especially for longer term development this Wiki will be more valuable.

=== Project Comments ===

* Ned Horning's comments [[Some_comments|are here]].

* From Helena Mitasova
I read Ned comments - if you look at NCGIA Core Curriculum, it is very broad, so I suggest to keep at least the word Curriculum there (drop Core)--if we want to stress education in general, how about calling it Education and Curriculum Project. It would be great if we could build a curriculum that people who teach at universities and colleges could use to build OSGEO courses and programs (NCGIA curriculum linked in
the docuemnt is a good example). For example, if I had to teach geospatial analysis using GRASS, I am OK, but if I wanted to include a section about Mapserver a curriculum section prepared by somebody who has a lot of experience with it would be a great help.

* From Charlie Schweik
Since I am new to this group and have been introduced via my email address, for the group's information let me give you a short status on what I am up to. I am a faculty at University of Massachusetts, Amherst in the Department of Natural Resources Conservation. Right now I have two part-time students helping me develop some tutorials on Q-GIS. I have been teaching an Intro to GIS course for some time but am
relatively new to OS GIS products, so I'll be learning. I am planning on offering in April-May sessions to my students an overview to Q-GIS, and then some tutorials on fundamentals like georeferencing a scanned map, online digitizing, getting GPS data overlaid, etc. I see this as an entry point toward the use of GRASS. My ultimate goal over the next 6-8 months is to have some kind of distance learning material developed for use in an "Intro to OS GIS" online course offered out of my institution next Spring 2007. Having done research in Nepal for several years, part of my motivation for doing this was to help my colleagues there who desperately need GIS but face serious budgetary problems. I am not exactly sure how this will work under the context of my University's distance learning program. But I am a great proponent of open access and hope to use some kind of open content license (e.g., creativecommons.org) and see great value in helping move this project forward by contributing the material here to this broader educational effort. I need to see what kinds of requirements my university has related to material and an "official" online course that might get in the way of this vision. I had always envisioned making my material available somehow (e.g., MIT Open Courseware, FreeGIS.org, etc.) so the establishment of this OSGeo Curriculum and Education project is exciting to me. In short, I hope I can figure out how to use what I am doing to help this project and perhaps through this effort whatever we develop can be improved by the community here.

* From Ari Jolma
Gary Watry from FSU has prepared a 65 page Quantum GIS tutorial, which could be useful, at least duplicate work should be avoided. I got it from him directly, as far as I know it is not yet on the web.

Concerning the curriculum and education project in general. I think we don't want to do something similar as NCGIA website, which, by the way, is not linked to any specific software as far as I see.

I try to be inpartial in my teaching, which is often difficult in this field and may lead to confusion on the students part sometimes on software issues. I also try to teach theory as opposed to practical use of software. So I have problems trying to figure out what is it that we should produce. I think tutorials like Gary's are good. Another good idea could be complete worked out examples, which the students can re-do, perhaps on their own time (distance learning) or without too much tutoring in a computer classroom. I've done a few like that (for example non-point source modeling and travel time analysis) but they still need quite a lot of tutoring. One problem I have is that as the software develops so fast (and I've used mostly my own..) the procedure changes slightly from year to year.

Using free tools in distance learning is really good because students can freely install their own copies of the software. On the other hand, for example my software is currently Linux-only, so it is not practical with many people. => There's a common interest with the OSGeo project creating installation packages.

I'd like to have some sort of timetable and agreed ways of working: mostly email or mostly wiki?

* From Gary Watry (Florida State University)watry@coaps.fsu.edu
I have been tasked by my boss to put together a set of tutorials on different open source GIS software packages for Grad and Post-Doc Students. I have completed Quantum GIS (QGIS), am working on uDig, then will do MapWindow, Diva-GIS, etc. I want to put all the software tutorials into the same format (Similar to QGIS). Eventually Iwould like to see it added as a distant learning course at FSU. The course work is currently going to several different University Faculties as well as here at FSU. It is also going to over 70 individuals around the world (North America, South America, Africa, Europe, Asia). I have already talked to someone at OSGeo and they said that they would host a copy of all the tutorials as well as a FSU Site when I get it built.

* From Helena Mitasova (in response to Charlie)
My idea in that respect was to use it to outline what to teach in different units (that is what NCGIA does) and then link to it a material that shows how to do it in a specific software using selected data. So for example we can have a unit on DEMs and topographic analysis
- the Curriculum will outline what is included under that unit and that can then be linked to several materials:
- general theory including equations and algorithms (this can be just a link to a relevant chapter in FreeGISBook)
- teaching material for use with GRASS
- teaching material for use with SAGA
- whatever else will people contribute to support this unit.

In this way we can minimize redundancy, cover number of different software packages and it will have an additional benefit that you can compare and see what would be the best for the class - e.g. topoanalysis in one package maybe more suited for natural resources students a different one would be better for computer science.

* From Prof. Venkatesh Raghavan
I think Curriculum, Education and Capacity Building initiatives
related to OSGEO could be broken down to three (or more) phases

;Phase 1 Short term (six months)
:a) Assimilation of existing tutorial, lecture notes, training documents, presentations that are available or could be made available under Open Document or Creative Commons License.

:b) Discuss how Curriculum can be structured with existing resources. Identify gaps for developing new material.

;Phase 2 Medium term (one year)
:a) Setup a e-learning portal (www.moodle.org) to manage existing course material and obtain user feedback. Have been experimenting with Moodle recently and we are trying to put together a online training course based on some of the material that we developed earlier. Could help with hosting a Moodle site if necessary (http://wgrass.media.osaka-cu.ac.jp/elearn/)

:b) Develop multi-media contents (animations, screen casting), data set for tutorial etc to facilitate self-learning.

;Phase 3 Long term (two three years)

:a) Develop standardized mechanism for testing (question banks, quiz, assignments etc). Moodle is quite good for this purpose

:b) Translation to local language and collection of datasets for geographic locations some language locales. Working with datasets that the candidate is familiar with can make learning easier.

:c) Initial review and improvement of contents and possible establishment of OSGEO Virtual University to cater to education, testing and certification of OSGEO Engineer.

* From Prof. Venkatesh Raghavan
We had discussed issues about Accredited Professional training before, I reproduce some of the thoughts below.
An OSGEO-CE (OSGEO- Certified Engineer), something in the lines of, PostgreSQL-CE, RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer). Having a OSGEO with tie-ups to some Universities,Academic societies, Industry, that could

a) design and market courseware and educational material
b) assure quality
c) provide accreditation to institutions that will start the course and also training to instructors at such institutes.
d) Evolve standardized mechanism for testing and certificate of candidates
c) Issue acrredited certification to successful candidates and provide placement counseling.

I think there is a market for such packaged educational and career solutions at least in Asia. I know of at least a few institutes in Aiaa that have been set-up during the last two years and have successfully (at least in term of candidate intake, the course content leaves a lot to be desired) implemented similar business model for proprietary Geoinfomrtics solutions.

Among numerous benefits that such a initiative would bring about, the one most important would be that it would help generate a pool of qualified professionals and developer who could in turn enrich the OSGEO Community.

Some additional thoughts and info about Professional Certification for OSGEO

a) A Japanese company started a Professional certification for PostgreSQL since 1st March 2005.
Details about the Certification are available at http://osb.sra.co.jp/postgresqlce/about_en.html
The testing is managed by Pearson VUE(http://www.vue.com/).
Details are available at http://www.vue.com/sra/ As per http://osb.sra.co.jp/postgresql-ce/news_en.html#20050224

b)Linux Professional Certification (http://www.lpi.org/en/home.html) offers accredited training and conducts training thru LPI approved training center the worldover. Candidates can register to take LPI exams at Pearson VUE testing centres worldwide(http://www.vue.com/) and Thomson Prometric (http://securereg3.prometric.com/Welcome.aspx) "LPI holds special exam labs at major Linux and IT tradeshows and conferences around the world, often offering LPI certification exams for substantially reduced pricing or in some cases free of cost."

c) Bradford Learning (http://www.bradfordlearning.com/en/start_page.php)
also offers LPI certification apart from various others including
apache, samba, mysql etc.

d) Some other listed as LPI sponsors (http://www.lpi.org/en/sponsors.html) also offer/manage Professional certification

* From David Hastings

I wonder if existing core curricula could be considered as relatively adequate (unless a further assessment determines otherwise). On the other hand, educational/training support for OSS has generally received bad press - and this group could help make considerable progress on that front.

I don't fully agree with the bad press about OSS support. Indeed, I seem to remember that Info World gave Red Hat Linux an award several years back for its support services - partly to counter that bad press. I personally found extensive support when I first used GRASS (in 1987), first became a GRASS system manager (in 1988), first installed Linux and put GRASS on my first dual-boot PC (in 1994), first stumbled across file-level interoperability between two GISs (1995, between GRASS and Idrisi byte data files), etc. Much support has been virtual, through searches of discussion group archives.

Nevertheless, training support for OSS GIS could be stronger. I think this could be the greatest challenge, and opportunity, in the educational arena for an Open-Source Geospatial Foundation.

My attempt to answer this during 1994-2002 was the CyberInstitute Short-Course in GIS, which ran additionally until sometime last year, 3 years after I departed Boulder for Bangkok and the UN. I think that such a general approach, strengthened by the ideas and circumstances of this Foundation, could be a useful piece in the puzzle of OSS educational/training support.

Implementation of something like the CyberInstitute Short-Course could be part of Venka's outline item 1b in his discussion on implementation phases (2 discussions above this one). I'd suggest that the name (CyberInstitute Short-Course) be considered for continuation, as it gained a bit of respect over the decade-plus that it ran on the NOAA/NGDC Website.

Please see my additional comments on the discussion page.

* From Venkatesh Raghavan

a) What are the objectives of the Core Curriculum?

The main focus would be on providing a solid foundation on Geoinformatics technology using OSGEO tools as a means of education and self-learning.

b) Who will be the actual customer to adopt the core curriculum would it be the institution or organisation which would ultimately employ our graduates?

We can think of regular and corporate sponsored training. Also focus on tailor-made courses. Direct marketing to potential clients would require lot of efforts. Maybe we need to think of providing packaged educational solutions (franchising) to institutions and universities.

c) Which kind of institutions/companies would employ OSGEO Prodessionals?

Geoinformatics industry, Government Institutions, NPO, NGO, Self-employed, Geo-contents service providers etc.

d) What would be the entry strategy? Will it be with high end courses or low end courses – i.e. in terms of pricing, content, etc?

We have to see what is presently available and at what cost. Most of info available from Google Search are summarized at http://www.institute.redlands.edu/kemp/certificates.html#Related. Details of two institutions presently offering courses in India are http://www.gisinstitute.net/upcoming.asp?id=27 http://www.mapmiddleeast.org/2006/conference/training.htm and http://www.symbiosis.ac.in/sig/course.htm. One example from Thailand is available at http://www.gac.ait.ac.th/training/catalog.php. Pricing info at these sites could be serve as reference in the Asian context. The course contents have to be decided after more discussions. I think the course should be modular introduced in a phased manner 6-8 weeks

Level 1: Introduction to GIS and Web Mapping Technologies: Basically how to install, use, producing maps using OSGEO tools. Completion of this level could result in certification as “XXXYYY Certified Application User”

Level 2: Geo-spatial Database Development: Open data standards, GML, Remote Sensing, GPS, mobile GIS, RDBMS. Completion of this level could result in certification as “XXXYYY Certified Spatial Database Manager”

Level 3: Advanced Module for Application Developers: Spatial data analysis using GRASS, Web GIS application development,using Mapserver Script languages, PHP, Javascript, Python. Completion of this level could result in certification as “XXXYYY Certified Application Developer”

Level 4: Advanced Module for Software Developers Developing Geoinformatics software and cross-platform GIS solutions e.g. GRASS Programing & Libraries, Data Exchange Libraries, C programming, Qt, Python, Plug-in development for QGIS. Software packaging (RPM etc.) Completion of this level will result in certification as “XXXYYY Certified Geoinfromatics Engineer”

Option to get a Master degree after completion for 4 Levels and conducting project research (in 16 to 18 weeks) could also be considered at a later stage.

* From [[User:Arnulf Christl | Arnulf Christl]]
Seems like there is not much input from commercial organisations yet, so I might just add some thoughts. We have founded the [http://www.geo-consortium.de Geo-Consortium] several years ago and built a curriculum for the Open Source SOA OGC standarized SDI Stack that most of our customers (WebGIS and SDI) need. This is a highly compressed approach, we hammer the required information into the brains within a very short time for a very high amount of money). So this differs highly from the universitarian long term learning curve model. Is this kind of ad hoc learning/training relevant in the context of this Core Curriculum / Educational approach? If yes we are willing to contribute with presentations and learning material which is designed to take a software stack and get going asap.

I will need to talk to the document contributors who until now have managed to efficiently prevent me from putting everything under GNU FDL for reasons of market leadership - the idea/fear being that freely available material will lessen the need of people to actually pay (lots) for courses which is the main revenue generated by the Geo-Consortium. It is my opinion the leraning material itself without a trainer is not enough to get things done in as short a time as one week, also regarding that you need a running hardware infrastructure, etc. So it would not harm to make the material available for secondary use in universitarian courses. But I must explain this to my contributors, not you... :-)

* From [[User:Pnaciona | Perry Nacionales]]
I tend to agree with both Arnulf and Prof. Raghavan in that we have two general kinds of audience--those who are in "formal" academia and those who are already in the professional fields trying to expand their knowledge. The latter require something that won't take a lot of their time--the materials they require could be dense/packed but it shouldn't take more than a week (or a day!) to complete (it could be a series of intense but short seminars). The former will of course need something that lasts an entire school term. These two general categories can be further broken into finer subcategories and most comments address that already. It would be nice if someone can summarize these comments and present this as a proposal for a curriculum/outreach committee... I'm partial to just calling this Education and Outreach Committee. :)

A couple other things... there's an overlap between this committee/project and the visibility committee and we ought to collaborate with that group in the areas where our aims meet. We should also promote the use of open geospatial data and should work with the [[Public_Geospatial_Data_Committee | Public Geospatial Data Committee]] group for our data needs.

* From Brandon Plewe
OSGEO does not need (nor is in a strong position) to create a curriculum. There are plenty of initiatives already existing to do that (if anything, it's already a bit diluted), such as the [http://www.ucgis.org/priorities/education/modelcurriculaproject.asp UCGIS GIS&T Body of Knowledge]. What OSGEO should be doing is developing teaching/learning materials (labs, tutorials, datasets) that are aligned with these curricula, documenting connections between the general knowledge and OS technical solutions (e.g., "This skill can be performed with GRASS, this one with mapserver"), and getting involved in existing initiatives to make sure that they fairly consider open source solutions. For example, in the UCGIS initiative, we had to do a lot of work at the end to take out vendorese language and include things like mapping hacks.

== Potential Members ==
''If you add people/orgs to this list, please indicate whether you're adding yourself/your organization or whether you are "nominating" the person/organization as a potential member.''

=== Individuals ===
* Scott Emmons (added by Tyler): University of Northern British Columbia - emmons at unbc.ca.
* Ned Horning (added by self): American Museum of Natural History’s Center for Biodiversity and Conservation horning@amnh.org [http://www.geospatial.amnh.org www.geospatial.amnh.org]
* Ari Jolma (added by self): Helsinki University of Technology, Finland ari.jolma at tkk.fi
* Puneet Kishor (added by self): punkish at eidesis dot org; GeoAnalytics, Inc., soon to join [http://www.wisc.edu Univ of Wisconsin - Madison]
* Tyler Mitchell (added by markusN): Author of Web Mapping Illustrated [http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/webmapping]. Seminars at local schools: University of Northern British Columbia, Canada [http://gis.unbc.ca] and College of New Caledonia, Canada [http://cnc.bc.ca]. Email tylermitchell at shaw.ca.
* Helena Mitasova (added by self): North Carolina State University, hmitaso@unity.ncsu.edu [http://skagit.meas.ncsu.edu/~helena/]
* Pericles Nacionales (added by self): University of Minnesota, naci0002 at umn dot edu
* Matthew Perry (added by self): University of California, Santa Barbara, perrygeo at gmail dot com
* Shaun Walbridge (added by self): University of California, Santa Barbara, walbridge at nceas.ucsb.edu
* Charlie Schweik (added by self): University of Massachusetts, Amherst, cschweik at pubpol dot umass dot edu [http://people.umass.edu/cschweik people.umass.edu/cschweik]
* Ian Turton (added by self): Penn State Uni, State College, developed Open Web Mapping course at Uni of Leeds, UK [http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/courses/postgrad/geog5780/] now modifying it for PennState. ianturton at gmail com [http://www.geovista.psu.edu/members/turton/index.html work] [http://pennspace.blogspot.com/ blog]
* Venkatesh Raghavan (added by self): Osaka City University, Japan raghavan at .media.osaka-cu.ac.jp
* Aaron Racicot (added by self): Ecotrust, Portland Oregon USA - aaronr at ecotrust.org
* David Hastings (added by self): United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, email hastingsd at un.org
* Arnulf Christl (added by self): Geo-Consortium Training Services

=== Organizations ===

* 52North (added by Andreas Wytzisk): http://www.52north.org

== Existing Work ==

* [http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/giscc/ The NCGIA Core Curriculum in GIScience]
* [http://www.ucgis.org/priorities/education/modelcurriculaproject.asp The UCGIS Model Curricula Project], including the GIS&T Body of Knowledge, the most comprehensive attempt yet at classifying GIS knowledge
* [http://www.r-s-c-c.org/ Remote Sensing Core Curriculum]
* [http://geoworkforce.olemiss.edu/ IAEGS Curriculum], University of Mississippi, primarily focused on Remote Sensing
* [http://www.usgif.org/content.asp?pl=455&contentid=460 USGIF Academic Committee], aiming to accredit programs for Geospatial Intelligence
* [http://www.gisci.org/ GIS Certification Institute], creating standards for certified GIS Professionals
* [http://www.asprs.org/membership/certification/ ASPRS Certification Programs], including GIS
* [http://people.umass.edu/cschweik/research.html C. Schweik: 2005-2010. NSF CAREER Grant. “The Open Source/Content Commons as a New Paradigm for Collaborative Scientific Research: A Research and Teaching Agenda.”] - MN had some personal conversation at OSG'05
* [http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/courses/postgrad/geog5780/ Open Web Mapping course] - Ian Turton, this is under the creative commons despite living on a University web site, I just haven't got a good new home for it yet.
* D. Hastings, 1994 et seq., The CyberInstitute Short-Course on Geographic Information Systems. Formerly hosted at http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov. Now archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20040221110141/www.ngdc.noaa.gov/seg/tools/gis/referenc.shtml

== GFOSS Books ==

* S. Erle, R. Gibson, and J. Walsh, 2005, Mapping Hacks. O'Reilly Media, Inc., 564 pages, ISBN 0596007035, http://mappinghacks.com

* S. Erle and R. Gibson, 2006, Google Maps Hacks. O'Reilly Media, Inc., 366 pages, ISBN: 0-596-10161-9, http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/googlemapshks/

* B. Kropla, 2005, Beginning MapServer: Open Source GIS Development (Expert's Voice in Open Source). Apress, 448 pages, ISBN 1590594908, http://www.apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=443

* T. Mitchell, 2005, Web Mapping Illustrated: Using Open Source GIS Toolkits. O'Reilly Media, Inc., 367 pages, ISBN 0596008651, http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/webmapping/

* M. Neteler and H. Mitasova, 2004, Open Source GIS: A GRASS GIS Approach. 2nd Ed. Kluwer Academic Publishers/Springer, Boston. 424 pages, ISBN 1402080646, http://mpa.itc.it/grasstutor/index.phtml