Edu goals and to dos

Coordinated OSGeo Edu Webinars - Sept-December 2012

Our goal is to start a new and coordinated international OSGeo educational webinar series, beginning September, 2012. We are using this page to try and figure out what this webinar series might look like.

Target Audiences

Please add other ideas here:

1. Undergraduate or graduate students
2. Train the trainers -- our education group members who might be tooling up to add new content to some existing courses
3. General public -- anyone interested in FOSS4G or FOSS4G technologies

Types of webinars

This is where Cameron and I might have a difference of opinion and given his track record of getting things done I take his views quite seriously and respectfully. But I my concern is related to Yochai Benkler's (Wealth of Networks) idea of "task granularity." But I think we will get more people to step up to do a webinar if we reduce the amount of work they have to do up front to put the webinar together. Fine or smaller tasks will be undertaken more easily than tasks that take more work. I worry that forcing a template on presenters will reduce their willingness to participate. Some options:

1. OSGeo Colloquium Series. This would be talk series where people in OSGeo edu or affiliated with OSGeo projects can present some of their current work with people interested in education as their target audience. The motivation for presentation is that people WANT to do it for their own reasons. The idea here would be that people on this list with expertise in a topic and interest to present to the community might step up and offer to give a talk on a topic of their choosing. I can't see a template working here and this is what I have had in my mind. The benefit of this is that it would get us online and talking as a group and motivations would be because presenters want to tell others about what they are doing. I think Helena's proposal on 3D visualization or my proposal on my open source study are examples of this kind of webinar.
2. Introduction to OSGeo projects. I think this could be a great step forward for our group. For example, I have a research project where I'd like to post, periodically, data points on a map on a webpage. I think Open Layers would be a way for me to do this, but I don't know anything about putting up a page with an open layers-based map. I'd really like to see a presentation by a knowledgable person on what you can do with Open Layers. I could see potentially a template here being established, and perhaps it is the Live DVD tutorial done as a recording, as Cameron suggested a few months back. I also don't know if a standard template could be created for the different projects -- would the template look the same for QGIS compared to Geoserver or PostGIS, for example?
3. Other relevant topics. Stephan's idea of a webinar on GIS licenses would be an example. Or a topic on FOSS4G open data standards. Or a presentation related to the "Geospatial Technology Competency Model (GTCM) that the GeoTech Center is working with.

Other ideas? Please add here or add to the topic list below if you have something you'd be willing to present...

Possible Webinar topics and authors

Colleagues, please add topics you might be willing to present below. (Numbering purely for identification.)

1. 3D visualization or some other topic related to processing and analyzing terrain data. -- Helena Mitasova
2. Open source collaboration -- findings from a 5 year study of Sourceforge.net projects. (This is not on geospatial specifically, but I think people will find it interesting.) -- Charlie Schweik
3. Introduction to OSGeo geospatial technologies (each of the different OSGeo software projects) -- who?
4. GIS software categories and projects - Stefan Steiniger
5. GIS licenses - Stefan Steiniger
6. Role of metadata catalogue software in Spatial Data Infrastructures - Paul van Genuchten
7. Multispectral and hyperspectral analysis with FOSS.