Edu current initiatives

2012-2013 OSGeo Education and Curriculum Current Initiatives

1) Continue to build up our educational material federated content databases

[OSGeo edu's educational content metadatabase] -- a place for metadata and links to external material we are posting on our own websites
[University of Nottingham's educational content database] -- a place for us to store education content (the source code) to share

2) Continue to expand the Open Geospatial Labs Network (this effort is led by Suchith Anand at the University of Nottingham, UK)

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 and Research Centres across the world for supporting development of open-source geospatial software technologies, training and expertise. It also aims to provide support for building-up and supporting development of open source GIS teaching and training materials, joint organization of open source GIS events, workshops through the ICA network for wider participation globally etc. Details at http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/MOU_ICA

The current list of labs in the network are:

Europe

1. University of Nottingham, UK http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/ngi/research/geospatial-science/geospatial-science.aspx
2. University of Girona, Spain http://www.sigte.udg.edu/
3. University of Southampton, UK [ website to be ready in Dec 2012]
4. Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic http://geo.fsv.cvut.cz/gwiki/Osgeorel
5. NewCastle University, UK http://research.ncl.ac.uk/osgeolab/

South America

1. Federal University of Paraná, Brazil [website in development]
2. São Paulo State University (UNESP), Brazil [process of being established]

North America

1. North Carolina State University, USA http://gis.ncsu.edu/osgeorel/
2. University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA [process of being established]

Asia

1. UNMC, Malaysia [website in development] http://www.nottingham.edu.my/Geography/Newsitems/Establishing-Open-Source-Geospatial-Lab.aspx
2. Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM), Malaysia [process of being established]
3. National College of Public Administration and Governance (NCPAG), University of the Philippines [process of being established]
4. Environmental Science for Social Change (ESSC), Philippines [process of being established]

Africa

1. University of Pretoria ,South Africa http://web.up.ac.za/default.asp?ipkCategoryID=16055&subid=16055&ipklookid=11&archive=1&ArticleID=14111
2. Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD), Kenya [process of being established]
3. University of Ghana, Ghana [process of being established]

Interested in adding your own node into the International Open Source Geospatial Education and Research Lab network?

Email Suchith.Anand@nottingham.ac.uk and cc Helena Mitasova ‎[hmitaso@ncsu.edu]‎, Charlie Schweik ‎[cschweik@pubpol.umass.edu]‎, Anne Ghisla [a.ghisla@gmail.com] to start the conversation and they will be happy to discuss details and guide you through the process.

The key requirements for establishing a local OSGL are:

(A) Both parties should work for the vision of the ICA-OSGeo MoU to develop collaboration opportunities for academia, industry and government organizations in open source GIS software and data in the future.

(B) Someone at your institution or organization should have a strong Geospatial knowledge and vision to lead this activity and build a team of people, locally.

(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 the other nodes in the network and others to understand and promote your local efforts around research and teaching of open source geospatial technologies and approaches.

From our end, we will 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 (for example the EOLGeo platform). We will also add the info 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.