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Hi all,<br>
<br>
I unfortunately won't be able to participate because I'll be in class
teaching. I'm trying to get a research assistant to take my place, but
at this point it is unclear whether I'll have someone participating or
not. I am new to IRC and it turns out our university's virus protection
software is blocking the IRC channel. When I turn it off, the
university system automatically blocks the IRC ports again. I'll have
this worked out for the next meeting and hope for sure I can attend
that one.<br>
<br>
Since I can't attend, I'll post here what I would say if I were on IRC.<br>
<br>
Regarding key threads (#2 below) -- As I've said, I've made a
commitment to teach an online Intro to GIS course using FOSS software
for Spring 2007. To that end, we are working on material for that now.
I've taught an Intro to GIS for 6 years with good student feedback and
have a decent course in place using ArcGIS. I'm trying to move all that
over to FOSS -- mainly Quantum as an easier front end (like an ArcView)
and then GRASS for more complicated stuff. We're making progress with
the Quantum material, but I am new to GRASS so have a learning curve
there. But what I should do (as someone suggested) is put our current
outline for the course as it stands on the wiki. If someone wanted to
work with us on the GRASS material, that would be great. <br>
<br>
In short, <b>please list me down for whatever subcommittee that plans
to develop an Intro to FOSS GIS course for undergrads/grads</b>. I hope
that subcommittee might be willing to develop material that could be
licensed under a creative commons license (new derivatives OK). If you
need a chair for that subcommittee, I might be willing to take that on.
<br>
<br>
The Intro course we are developing is intended to reach people in two
fields: (1) natural resources conservation/management, and (2) students
in public administration. I'm hoping to make it more internationally
relevant, so, for example, we've got some material already on getting
GIS data from the web that lists some international repositories or US
repositories that house international data. <br>
<br>
We're also interested in developing a second more advanced course that
might be a spatial analysis course with GRASS, or another idea is a
course on how to implement a MapServer application. But we'd turn to
that probably a year from now. <br>
<br>
Cheers and apologies in advance for not making the IRC discussion.<br>
<br>
Charlie Schweik<br>
UMass Amherst<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
Puneet Kishor wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid443D9351.8040900@eidesis.org" type="cite">
<pre wrap=""> Meeting
The first meeting takes place via IRC #osgeo. Meeting time Thursday,
April 13, 2006 at 8:00 AM Chicago time
Agenda (as posted by Puneet and extended by Ari)
1. To introduce ourselves and our interests (sort of a repeat of what
is there on the wiki already, but it will help get everyone know each
other).
2. To try and identify a few key threads in the variety of interests
that we want to pursue.
3. To attempt to aggregate ourselves into sub-committees that would
pursue the various threads separately. We can't all be everything to
everyone, so we have to break up our goals into sub-goals, and try and
accomplish those -- from higher research, to curriculum, to pre-packaged
tools, to evangelism... lets begin to identify them consensually.
4. Organize Wiki pages
anything else.
I will be using Chatzilla. I will come on a few mins early just to make
sure the dang thing works (first time for me), so drop by and say "hello".
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</blockquote>
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