Geoforall criteria

Criteria for admission to “ICA-OSGeo-ISPRS” Labs

In September 2011, the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and the International Cartographic Association (ICA) signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the aim of developing on a global basis collaboration opportunities for academia, industry and government organizations in open source GIS software and data. The MoU aims to provide expertise and support for the establishment of Open Source Geospatial Laboratories across the world for supporting development of open-source geospatial software, open data, open standards training and expertise. ISPRS joined this initiative in 2014. The motto of ICA-OSGeo Lab initiative is "Geo For All".

The key requirements for establishing a local Open Source Geospatial Laboratory (OSGL) are:

(A) Your local organisation MUST BE COMMITTED TO CONTRIBUTE to the vision outlined in the ICA-OSGeo MoU [1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/MOU_ICA to develop collaboration opportunities for academia, industry and government organizations in open source GIS software ,open data and open education in the future.

(B) At least one person at your institution or organization should have strong knowledge in geospatial information science and vision to lead this activity and to build a team of people, locally. This person should act as a liaison officer to the initiative.

(C) There should be a website established for your Open Source Geospatial Laboratory listing current research, people, and training information. This web presence will allow other nodes in the network and the general public to understand and promote your local efforts around research and teaching of open source geospatial technologies and approaches.

The website should be established within a year of the lab announcement and has to be maintained at least annually.

(D) GEO4ALL MAKES A COMMITMENT TO promote the initiative widely through both OSGeo and ICA channels to help build up collaboration opportunities for the future. We will also do a joint press release to announce the initiative and start building collaborations. A primary collaborative initiative continues to be the creation and maintenance of shared open access educational resources and/or active participation in the open source software and data development. We will also add the information of all labs in the Open Geospatial Lab network node site within OSGeo website so that all participating labs urls are added and linked.

We especially welcome applications from universities, educational institutes, government organisations in developing countries to help develop capacity building in geospatial education by establishing Open Source Geo Labs.

Proposal: the request to become a new Lab could be started also as a ticket on OSGeo Trac system or as email to the nodal contacts (for those who are not that technically focussed). The nodal contact will make the decision on approval as now, but the whole process will be more efficient.

Criteria for maintaining active status as ICA-OSGeo-ISPRS Lab

The Lab shall demonstrate activity that supports the Geo4all vision. The activities can be documented on the lab website, at conferences etc.

Examples of possible activities:

- participating at FOSS4G [2] or related Open Source/Open Data/Open Education conferences

- teaching a course, workshop or presenting a webinar on Open Source and /or Data

- publishing scientific papers with a focus on Open Source and /or Data

- participating in OSGeo or Local Chapter committees

- collaborations with other ISA-OSGeo Labs (projects, courses)

- Google Summer of Code mentoring [3]

- translating and publishing material especially in public repositories

- actively contributing to Open Source projects (code, helping on mailing lists)

- Participate and contribute to Open Standards development, for example through the OGC Memorandum of Understanding with OSGeo

Suggested frequency of updates on activity: yearly, at end of academic year. Set a deadline that will match comfortably with many other end of year deadlines, or suggest a way to track activities automatically during the year on the Lab's website (blog posts with keywords, a section with yearly activities that is filled incrementally along the year). Arnulf proposes to make a report to be published with the annual FOSS4G conference proceeds (so reports to be send in the mail list in August).

The report of activities shall be a page on the Lab's website, if no other format is already available from other reporting activities requested by the Institution itself.The most recent report will be linked in the main table on the wiki page Edu_current_initiatives. The history of reports will reside on a wiki page for each lab, or better a global wiki page on OSGeo wiki, in a table, that can be ordered either per Lab name, either per year. When it will become unparsable we will think of a database of some sort or a section in Geoforall website.

Labs who do not provide the yearly report, or have no activities to report, will change their status to "Inactive since <year>". They will be contacted by Advisory Board, or the nodal contact for the given region. In case of no feedback, the Lab will be still kept as inactive and contacted again the following year.

At any time any member lab can leave the ICA-OSGeo-ISPRS lab network by a sending an letter of declaration to the Advisory board.

[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/MOU_ICA [2] http://ww.foss4g.org [3] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Category:Google_Summer_of_Code