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".

The key requirements for establishing a local Open Source Geospatial Laboratory (OSGL) 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.

(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. The website should be established within a year of the lab announcement and maintained at least annually.

(D) GEO4ALL MAKES A COMMITMENT to promote the initiative widely through both OSGeo, ICA and ISPRS channels to help build up collaboration opportunities for the future. A joint press release to announce the initiative and start building collaborations will be made by OSGeo and ICA. 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. Information on all labs in the Open Geospatial Lab network will be added within Geoforall.org website so that all participating labs urls are added and linked.

Applications from universities, educational institutes and government organisations in developing countries are especially welcomed, to help develop capacity building in geospatial information science and education by establishing Open Source Geo Labs.

Proposal: the request to become a new Lab could be started also as a ticket on OSGeo Trac system or as email to the nodal contacts (for those who are not that technically focussed). The nodal contact will make the decision on approval as now, but the whole process will be more efficient.

Criteria for maintaining active status as ICA-OSGeo-ISPRS Lab

The Lab shall demonstrate activities that supports the Geo4all vision. The activities can be documented on the lab website, at conferences etc.

Examples of possible activities:

- participating at FOSS4G or related conferences (ICA, ISPRS)

- teaching a course, workshop or presenting a webinar

- publishing scientific papers

- Blog posts of labs activities

- participating in committees

- collaborations with other Labs (projects, courses)

- OSGeo- Google Summer of Code (SoC) mentoring

- translating and publishing educational material

- actively contributing to Open Source projects (code, helping on mailing lists)

- contributing to Open Education initiatives

Suggested frequency of updates on activity: yearly ( December every year):

The report of activities shall be a summary email to the mailing list page on the Lab's 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 removed from the list.

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.