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 : short courses, sessions and a Townhall event.. join our mailing list and stay tuned, volunteers are always welcome
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:
- Top 1: EGU GA 2016:
- OSGeo-related sessions
- Townhall preparation: Timeline / Volunteers
- Short courses: OSGeo-Scope / Format / Timeline / Volunteers
- Top 2: Promoting the new OSGeo Opengeoscience Committee
- Top 3: Various
Participants:
- Epifanio
- Madi
- Jeff
- Raffalba
- Peter
Outcome:
- Top 1
- OSGeo-related sessions
Madi will create a sub page on FOSS sessions and conferences
- 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
- Short courses: OSGeo-Scope / Format / Timeline / Volunteers
- Top 2: Outreach
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:
- 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"
- GIS DAY 2015
- New Hampshire Uni: Poster about OSGeo Live + OSGeo givewaways (Epifanio)
- GFZ Potsdam (Peter): Presentation
- GIS DAY 2015
- 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."
