[OSGeo-Edu] FOSS4G Academic Track

[Barend Köbben]

Dear list,

In a recent MoU between OSGE and ICA (the International Cartographic Association), one of the items was that ICA's Commission on Open Source Geospatial Technologies will team up with OSGEO to consolidate and strengthen the Academic Track at the annual global FOSS4G conferences.

Suchith Anand (the commission chair) has asked me to start organizing this and provide some ideas about the possible setup. Please find below this setup for comments and discussion at Friday's on-line meeting.

Dear Rafael, Serena and Helena, I have cc-d you this, although I assume you are not in this Friday meeting: Could  you cast a critical eye on my ideas, having prior experience with the Academic Track? Also, I think Serena and Helena are in the TGIS editorial board, could you tell me who best to contact on the possiblity of publishing there?
You'll notice also that your names are mentioned as candidates for the Scientific Committee, please feel invited for this (but not pressured ;-)


Yours,
--
Barend Köbben (Senior Lecturer)
ITC - University of Twente, Faculty of Geo-Information
Science and Earth Observation
PO Box 217, 7500AE Enschede (The Netherlands)
+31-(0)53 4874 253

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FOSS4G 2012 & further – Academic Track

The general idea is to strengthen the Academic Track at the annual global FOSS4G conference. Currently it is too dependent on local and ad-hoc efforts (however successful many of them have been), we need to develop a fixed scenario and publication outlets to streamline and consolidate the Academic Track.

For this we need a FOSS4G Academic track that is organised as follows:

 1.  A scientific committee is established (some 4-5 members) that in principle serve for several years, each year complemented with a local organisation liaison; This committee oversees the Call for Papers and the reviewing process and the publication efforts.
 2.  A reviewing committee is established under the auspices of the scientific committee, with members (some 20-30) that in principle serve for several years; Within this group there should be a sufficient spread of competencies/knowledge/expertise, to cover a wide range of paper subjects.
 3.  The Call for Papers is published sufficiently in advance for people to come up with full, scientific quality papers.
 4.  Reviewers are asked to (blind) review the papers for presentation at the conference; The target should be to end up with 20-25 acceptable papers for this stage.
 5.  The reviewers are additionally asked to indicate, for the papers they find acceptable for presentation, if they think the paper should be considered for publication in a special issue of a high quality academic journal. >From these highlighted papers, the scientific committee makes a selection of 8-10 papers for a special issue of a journal.
 6.  The selection of the papers for both presentation and for the academic journal should be finished before the conference takes place, so that the distinction can be made, e.g. by having a seperate session for selected papers. We should look into the possibility to have in coming years the journal published/printed and available at the conference (this will mean shifting the reviewing process forward to allow for journal production).

For this process to work we should work on the following actions:

 1.  Likely candidates for the academic journal should be identified and contacted. The most obvious candidate at present is "Transactions in GIS" (in which the 2004 and 2011 FOSS4G academic tracks have been published). Barend Köbben will contact the editors.
 2.  Barend will contact previous organisers of academic tracks and others for membership of a scientific committee under his chairmanship. Likely candidates at this stage are Rafael Moreno (Denver 2011), Serena Coetzee (Cape Town 2008 and TGIS editorial board) and Helena Mitasova (OSGEO board and TGIS editorial board), but others could and should be considered.
 3.  Suchith Anand contacts OSGEO (Arnulf Christl) for a liaison with the local organisers for Beijing 2012.
 4.  Barend will gather a list of candidates for the Reviewing Committee from previous years' committees, asking previous organisers for email contact details. We aim for some 20-30 people to ask for a commitment for several years and a keyword list of their interests and expertise.
 5.  For the whole procedure a good paper/conference submission system is essential. Barend will look into the possibilities.

The planned timeline for the 2012 track is:

 *   1st preliminary Call for Papers (basically dates and subject matter) before Christmas
 *   Detailed CfP (with procedures and detailed requirements): 1 February
 *   Full paper deadline: 31 March
 *   Reviewing decisions: 15 May
 *   Final (revised) papers deadline: July 15
 *   Final determination of journal contents: August 1
 *   Conference (preliminary dates 10-15 Sep)
 *   publication of special issue: ASAP

Note that in coming years we would plan for this timeline to be moved forward to have the published journal available at the conference.

Barend Köbben


________________________________
Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC)
University of Twente
Chamber of Commerce: 501305360000

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