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".Central to "Geo for All" mission is the belief that knowledge is a public good and Open Principles in Education will provide great opportunities for everyone.

The key requirements for joining "Geo for All" initiative 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.

How to apply for joining the network

With the region wise thematic groups established, the chairs of this are now the contact points for any new labs to be established in that region to contact and the mailing list becomes the first point of contact for the new members and all regional members in the region can use the list for collaborating on regional funding calls, FOSS4G local conferences etc. They will also be the administrators of the mailing lists and they will use the wikipages to develop their ideas with inputs from all members in their groups. This way we can make sure it is scaleable and meets local/region requirements/needs. The nodal contact will make the decision on approval as now, but the whole process will be more efficient.

Region wise thematic Groups

North America Region

Chairs: Helena Mitasova (USA), Charles Schweik (USA), Phillip Davis (USA)

The mail list will be geoforall-northamerica at lists.osgeo.org

Webpage at http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GeoForAll_North_America

South America Region

Chairs: Sergio Acosta y Lara (Uruguay) and Silvana Camboim (Brazil)

The mail list will be geoforall-southamerica at lists.osgeo.org

Webpage at http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GeoForAll_South_America

Africa Region

Chairs: Rania Elsayed Ibrahim (Egypt), Serena Coetzee (South Africa) and Bridget Fleming (South Africa)

The mail list will be geoforall-africa at lists.osgeo.org

Webpage at http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GeoForAll_Africa

Asia Region (including Australia)

Chairs: Tuong Thuy Vu (Malaysia/Vietnam) and Venkatesh Raghavan (Japan/India)

The mail list will be geoforall-asiaaustralia at lists.osgeo.org

Webpage at http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GeoForAll_Asia

Europe Region

Chairs: Maria Brovelli (Italy) and Anne Ghilsa (Germany)

The mail list will be geoforall-europe at lists.osgeo.org

Webpage at http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GeoForAll_Europe

Subject/Language Thematics

Urban Science - City Analytics Thematic

Theme Leaders - Chris Pettit (Australia) and Patrick Hogan (USA)

The mail list will be geoforall-urbanscience at lists.osgeo.org

Website at http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GeoForAll_UrbanScience_CityAnalytics

Teacher Training & School Education thematic

Theme Leaders - Elżbieta Wołoszyńska-Wiśniewska (Poland) and Adrian Manning (UK)

The mail list will be geoforall-teachertraining at lists.osgeo.org

Website at http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GeoForAll_TeacherTraining_SchoolEducation

Spanish thematic

Theme Leaders - Sergio Acosta y Lara (Uruguay) and Antoni Pérez Navarro (Spain)

The mail list will be geoforall-spanish at lists.osgeo.org

Website at http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/GeoForAll_Spanish

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

- contributing to Open Education activities

- 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