[OSGeo-Edu] More on the free GIS book

[Victor Olaya Ferrero]

Hi all.

First of all, I want to say thank you to all of you (specially Charlie and
Venka) for this nice discussion we are having about the best way to write
the book, it is being really fruitful for me.

There are many good ideas, and I have been thinking about them a bit. I
think we are going in the right direction, so here are my thoughts and a
little proposal to start organizing all this:

I definitely agree with Venka in using different softwares for the book
and the courses. For the spanish book we are using LaTeX + Subversion,
which is probably the best option available. Markus is using it for the
Grass courses he mentioned, and, according to what Helena told me, Markus
and her used it as well for the Grass book. However, I agree that we
cannot expect everyone to be able to use LaTeX or learn it just to
collaborate with us, and that we should accept collaborations in other
formats (Venka said OpenOffice, but even if someone wants to write in a
Wiki, we should take those materials and put them into the book as well if
they are interesting). Converting from ather formats to latex can be a
tedious and unpleasant task, so that rises a question: who is going to do
it ? maybe someone wants to volunteer for that (I think it is not likely
to happen...) but, if that is not the case, then I think that the book
comitte members should take that task or find a suitable solution. The
comitee is really an editorial comitee, and its members are (more or less)
the editors of the book. That means that they should assume some extra
tasks apart from just writing the book itself, like checking the
homogeneity of the book, preparing an index or coordinating all authors so
everything is homogeneous and the book does not look like an unconnected
collection of chapters. Those are boring tasks, I know...but someone has
to do them.

As I said, I would love to chair the comitee as Charlie proposed, and I
understand that it implies assuming this role of editor and having some
extra compromise with the book. I hope that the rest of the people who
volunteered for that agree with me.

So, in short, this is my proposal:

1) I will ask the spanish PSC members about all these, to see how we
manage the situation, since, as I said, I find the idea of having two
comitees (on for the book in spanish and one for the book in english)
terribly awkward an unpractical.
2) I will get in contact with all the people who showed interest in
helping us with the spanish book, to check if they still want to
participate and, if so, tell them about what is happening here and invite
them to join this list. As I told you, a few chapters are unassigned, but
other are assigned to people that did not show much activity since then.
Those chapters are completely unwritten, so maybe  should be re-assigned
to people from the english side who are more active, or maybe simply
co-authored.
3)By the end of the week, I will try to have a branch in the cvs(Lorenzo,
can you help me with this?) with all the LaTeX files, but only with the
headers (that is, just the name of each chapter), so you can all see it
and start writing. I will mark the chapters that are already written, or
at least partially written, so you can focus on the other ones. Before
starting writing, I think we should work out a bit all the chapter
assignments. The wiki is great for that. We can simply put the names of
the chapter, and let the people add their names to those chapters that
they want to coordinate. If several people show interest in coordinating a
chapter, they can privately reach an agreement. People wanting to
collaborate but not wanting to have the responsability of coordinating the
chapter, should get in contact with its coordinators. This might sound a
bit rigid, but I think is the best way to have everything properly
organized. It is also the usual way of writing a book like this. Just
because it is free does not mean that we should follow a different model.

So give me a week or so (I am a bit busy right now...) to have that ready
and to talk to the guys on the spanish side...and I hope that we can soon
start creating new contents for the book.

I would like to hear your opinion about all this, so please send all your
comments to the mailing list.

Regards (and sorry for the loooong email...)

Victor