Edu IRC Meeting Summary July 30 2010

Summary of main IRC points from July 30th meeting. Full IRC log is available at http://logs.qgis.org/osgeo/%23osgeo.2010-07-30.log

'''Proposed agenda/Discussion topics: ''' 1) Quick intros; 2) Discuss our educational inventory system; 3) Revisiting the “Webinar” idea… which lost momentum. 4) Discuss initiating a “New derivatives” system; 5) Should be connect more to software teams? ...	6) Should be connect more to software teams? 7) Should we connect more to OSGeo local groups? 6 ) Broader curriculum effort? 8) How to get more participation

Attendees:

Simon Cropper – Botanicus Australia – Natural Resource Consultancy Ian Turton – Penn State Cameron Shorter Micha Silver – Arava Drainage Authority (Israel, I believe) Mark Sanders – Educational Services Australia Suchith Anand – University of Nottingham Ned Horning – American Museum of Natural History Andrew Hunter – U of Calgary Charlie Schweik – U of Massachusetts, Amherst Massimiliano Cannata - Switzerland Venka Raghavan – Japan

Summary of main points/discussion topics brought up in our first IRC meeting

1. We should keep trying to build the inventory system. 2. Types of content we’d accept: Full courses, How-to documents, just about anything that might be of interest to others related to OS geospatial (e.g., presentation/lecture files, etc). There was renewed interest in establishing one or more education material “templates” (with Open Office writer encouraged by some). The issue here is there are a lot of potential types of material. Perhaps a start is a “How-to” template (not discussed-my suggestion).

3. Need to focus on incentives for authorship. One proposal suggested that we need to encourage authors who have an interest in getting their software used by saying “you create material, and we will help get it taught in universities around the world” – This is an important point in my view… INCENTIVES FOR authorship.

4. Discussion of the Licensing issue brought up in recent group emails. We need to revise the OSGeo Licensing page to reflect the conversation we’ve been having related to Simon’s “new derivative” concerns. There’s been good discussion over email but I’d like to get a document written rather than the email. Key components (reflections from the points raised in the IRC meeting):

We recommend that authors go to [1] and choose the license that fits their needs.

If you are willing to allow new derivatives to be made of your work, even commercially, choose: Creative Commons Attribution (cc-by)

If you are willing to allow new derivatives to be made of your work, but only for non-commercial purposes, consider: Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (by-nc-sa).

If you do not want to allow new derivatives, choose either the Attribution Non Commercial (by-nc) or the Attribution No Derivatives (by-nd) licenses.

[1] http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses

5. Discussion about the need for complimentary data to go with materials.