[OSGeodata] Tie-in to Education Committee

[Jo Walsh]

dear Tyler, all, sorry for the lag in response to this. 

> The education committee just had its first meeting.  It was good - one area of> focus that came up was to create a common data package that we will be able 
> to use for tutorial/courses, etc.  This is a good place for us to 
> cross-collaborate.  I just mention it in case some of you wanted to sign up 
> to the discuss at edu.osgeo.org list and participate in this little "Data 
> Package Working Group":
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Education_Working_Groups

I am glad to hear of your successful meeting! When the geodata
committee had its first meeting, there was an expression of interest
in three working groups, one of which is also concerned with packaging. 
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Geodata_Packaging_Working_Group#Participants
provides a longish list of people who might well be interested in
participating.

Between the two pages there are a set of goals that I am glad to see
in one place:

* Produce a data package for common use in tutorials 
* Work with software projects to provide data package in
  meaningful format for their tool
* Use data package as a reference in writing tutorials 

# Choose a data format for package distribution
# Define data sets
    * (what should be the contents of a training dataset)
# Set up metadata guidelines 
# Quality Control

It would be good to be able to describe 'next steps' on all of these
elements. The tutorial/documentation emphasis looks great.

> We're barely getting started but just wanted to mention it to you in
> your were interested.   Are there direct tie-ins to any efforts/plans the
> Geodata groups has been discussing?  

I'll definitely subscribe to your mailing list :) 

The Geodata group described three working groups but none of them have
the appropriate kind of 'forward energy' to need a mailing list or to have
dedicated IRC chat meetings. That said there's been a lot of apparent
interest in data packaging concerns and outcomes. Let's talk about
data packaging at Thursday's irc meeting[0] and also about how the
working group structure is working out. The Education Committee posse
would be very welcome in that discussion.

thanks,


jo

[0] http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Geodata_Committee_Meeting_20060420#Agenda_Items