FOSS4G EU Como 2015 BOF1

FOSS4G Europe in Como, July 16, 2015 Summary notes

Participants: BOF_signup_list. Thanks for Toni for taking notes!

We only had 45 minutes, so to make the meeting productive these questions were proposed:

• Geo4All What would you like to see Geo4All in 5 years -- 2020 (!) -- in the context of educational collaboration?
• Geo4All what we need to do together to achieve this vision?
• Geo4All what can we do THIS YEAR to move forward?
• Geo4All what can YOU DO THIS YEAR to move us toward this vision?'

We didn't have enough time to go through all these questions. The key points that came out of our group's discussion focuses on questions 1 and 4.

1.VISION OF GEOFORALL EDUCATION IN 2020

A. CURRICULAR

• Universities and schools responsible for this
• Build shared curriculum in a MODULAR fashion and based on curricular standards such as
  • the GIS&T Body of Knowledge (2014? Some updates being done on it now? Suchith says it may be by http://www.gi-n2k.eu/) and/or,
  • the GCTM
• Have a dataset sharing system
• Develop case-based material (e.g., solve a problem about flooding)
• Separate conceptual/theoretical from technology in course material. Design so that complementary exercises can be written for different technologies (e.g., QGIS, gvSig, Grass, etc.)
• Develop exercise materials with dataset names that are generic to allow for the 'swapping in and out' of data relevant to teaching location.

B. WEB-BASED SHARING PLATFORM

• Designed to allow the educator to search or easily find modules they want
• Could be graphical or hierarchical and/or built on one of the curriculum standards, where the user can click on a section and find available material (e.g., theory, exercises, cases) related to that concept
• Possible GeoForAll MOOC course(s)
• Whatever is implemented needs to be VERY SIMPLE and not demanding on the end user

C. INDUSTRY CONNECTIONS

• Students in our programs are getting internships with industry and academia that are involved in GeoForAll

2. STEPS OVER THE NEXT YEAR

- Dataset sharing (Lene) - Education Hackfest (QGIS) - Jupiter system: can we develop a Jupiter infraestructure? - Maybe to create several MOOC. Coursera for example allows to create several levels?

3. DISCUSSION ABOUT REGIONAL LISTS QUESTION

- We decided we should keep them for the next year. They may be useful for helping with 'language' problems in our network (people who don't speak english), and it may be too early to decide... not much traffic on these lists currently, so not relly competing with the main GeoForAll list.