Talk:Free GIS Book

Purpose of book
Is this a GIS book that is free?

Or is it a book about Free and Open Source GIS?

Both?

The semantics of 'free' (beer/lunch/freedom) are difficult for some people.

The OGC changed its name away from 'Open GIS Consortium' to 'Geospatial'; this is the open source geospatial foundation, not a GIS foundation. This is perhaps because GIS conjurs up imagery of bearded men and mainframes and massive centralised control-oriented systems. What makes this a GIS book?

Potential Audiences
Some of the most insightful comments on the OriginalFreeGISBook were questions about what the audience is. The overview is very broad and also deep. There is a lot to cover in one book. Different contributors will definitely have some idea about the audience they want to reach.

All these different sets of people may have different needs.


 * Programmers who are new to GIS
 * Students who are learning GIS software for the first time
 * Analysts who are used to proprietary GIS software and are interested in open source
 * Educators who are used to proprietary GIS and want to teach and learn open source
 * "Decision makers" on data infrastructure projects
 * Others... ?

Book creation platform
Is mediawiki the best environment for collaborative book production? (Maybe)

Why use the main OSGeo.org wiki? Rather than setting up a dedicated wiki for the book project - I think this would make it easier to "market", that people might otherwise be put off contributing if it's hard to separate out the content from the rest of the OSGeo.org wiki and it may seem like an OSGeo marketing exercise?

If mediawiki is good then why not do this on wikibooks which might encourage more contributors?

Are there going to be dedicated editors?

Are there plans to produce a hardcopy output of this book eventually?