Open Geoscience Committee

Background

The idea for the committee was conceived during a EGU-themed birds of a feather meeting at the FOSS4G-Europe in Como, Italy on July 16 2015

Motivation

There is currently no established interface between the OSGeo communities and geoscience organisations like the American Geoscience Union (AGU) or the European Geoscience Union (EGU). At the same time OSGeo members publish their scientific work, which is based on FOSS and open data, within such organisations, often without being aware of each other. Further, students and young scientists who are using FOSS as a base for their work need information on how to share this work and reap the recognition within Academia which they deserve.

Within geoscience, the new role model of "Open Science" or "Science 2.0" is emerging. Many desiderata for future "open scientists", including publication of both the data and software, active international networking and reach out to industry and society are already common practice within OSGeo. Therefore OSGeo can provide guidance by best practices on how these practices can be established within Academia.

Goals

• Launch the discussion how to address "Open Geoscience" among all stakeholders within OSGeo.

• Development of best practices within and beyond OSGeo.

• Establish communication with scientific communities such as EGU and AGU.

Communication

• through the OpenGeoscience mailing list (subscribe)

• conf calls are held via the OSGeo slack channel. Slack uses text based communication (similar to ICQ)

Activities

• Currently planning activities for EGU 2016 : a short course, sessions and a Townhall event.. join our mailing list and stay tuned, volunteers are always welcome

Ideas collected for the short course at EGU 2016

• Introductory course to OSGeo-Live, duration 90 minutes, preferably during lunch break.
• Material that could be presented include gsoc work of Massimo Di Stefano (aka 'epifanio'), a series of educational material based on OSGeo-Live, featuring the main software included in the distro.
• epifanio made himself available to create ad-hoc material in collaboration with those who will be giving the course. In fact, at present the main issue remains that we don't have a lecturer.

Next steps

• update this page / outline of committee
• [ACHIEVED] create mailing list (ticket)
• [ACHIEVED] draft email request to send to the OSGeo Board to create a new committee (preferably before next Board meeting on 13 August)
• Schedule a telco regarding EGU 2016 planning

Meetings

Channel

Meetings will be held on the Slack channel: #opengeoscience

Access

Please contact Jeff McKenna to receive an invite to the open geoscience committee slack channel

Minutes

https://osgeo.slack.com/archives/opengeoscience

Meeting 2015-10-30 18:00 hours

Topics

1. Top 1: EGU GA 2016:
   1. OSGeo-related sessions
   2. Townhall preparation: Timeline / Volunteers
   3. Short courses: OSGeo-Scope / Format / Timeline / Volunteers
2. Top 2: Promoting the new OSGeo Opengeoscience Committee
3. Top 3: Various

Participants

• Epifanio
• Madi
• Jeff
• Raffalba
• Peter

Outcome

Top 1: EGU GA 2016

1. OSGeo-related sessions

Madi will create a sub page on FOSS sessions and conferences

1. Townhall preparation: Timeline / Volunteers

Townhall topic and other details will be discussed later. Info about the past townhalls sits on the Wiki: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/EGU_Townhall_2015

Jeff lobbies OSGeo board to support Townhall even

Madi and Raffaele volunteer for the EGU Townhall preparation

1. Short courses: OSGeo-Scope / Format / Timeline / Volunteers

We are planning for one short course during the lunch hours, focusing on OSGeoLive, and possibly a second one to cover more detailed topics. We can announce the event during the FOSS-themed sessions and the Townhall. Target groups are ECS (young scientists) representatives group, NH and others divisions.

OSGeo-related topics for short course:

• initial introduction on FOSS and OSGeo
• "integration" of several open source software in a single workflow (use case) to accomplish very complex task in geospatial data analysis
• involve scientists that present in not deep way several tools and software

Use Integration of geospatial OSS in educational notebooks (Jupyter/binder) on OSGeo Live (GSOC 2015 project) to omit standard OSGeo Live spin-up/installation hazzles:

• No Desktop applications included
• Focus on software libraries or any other project which has a command line interface (R, GRASS, OSSIM, GDAL, Python, etc .. )
• Having a web interface for each to the workshop materials will simplify enormously the workshop logistic.
• Cloud platform based on binder (http://mybinder.org/) essentially it give "life" to any repository which has a specific structure.
• GSOC project example: https://github.com/epifanio/binder-docker-test the user just needs to open the browser and click to "launch binder" bunner to have access to a (osgeolive based, both data and sw) online.

Candidates for the second course (istSOS + PostGIS) need to be heard. topic of the second course needs to be discussed at a later time

Epifanio offers technical support for the first on the osgeolive (for which I can not be directly involved in giving the workshop) and very interested in a second one more focused on sw libraries and tools

Informatione about student grant opportunities need to be added to the Wili.

It remains to be determined which persons will give the short course(s) at EGU. The whole Open GeoScience group and ICA Geolabs should be contacted.

Epifanio will contact Maxi to discuss/push istSOS integration in the live and setup a wiki page on the osgeo wiki to plan the "osgeolive-egu-tuning"

Top 2: Outreach

• GIS DAY 2015
  • New Hampshire Uni: Poster about OSGeo Live + OSGeo givewaways (Epifanio)
  • GFZ Potsdam (Peter): Presentation
• MOSCOW GIS CONFERENCE: Jeff
• SAN FRANCISCO: GSOC MENTORS SUMMIT (Madi)

Top 3: Various

Student course: Prep of a prez about OSGeo-live for RAFFALBAs students (C2 Epifanio / Madi)

Past meetings

The minutes from past meetings can be found at this page

Members

• Margherita Di Leo, Founding Member
• Jeff McKenna, Founding Member, OSGeo President
• Peter Löwe, Founding Member [Chair]
• Massimiiano Cannata, Founding Member [Co-Chair]
• Phillip Davis, Member Geo For All Education Committee
• Maria Brovelli, GeoForAll Europa Chair
• Christian Strobl (German Remote Sensing Data Center, DLR-DFD)
• Raffaele Albano, Member

Events

FOSS related conferences/sessions are listed at this page

Pictures

Holding the 1st "charter" of the committee. On that paper was written: "Open Geoscience Committee: an entry for Open Source geoscience topics."

Founding meeting 01

Founding meeting 02