[OSGeo-Board] Kids GIS Portal

[Jo Walsh]

On Thu, Sep 28, 2006 at 03:06:40PM -0400, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> I have been in communication for a month or two with some folks launching
> a project to develop a Kids Environment GIS Portal, based on open source
> packages like MapGuide and PostGIS amoung other things.  I have encouraged
> them to participate in the educational committee, but another way I felt we
> could provide them with some support was to provide a "server blade" to host
> their portal during the development and early deployment phase.

This sounds great, FrankW. I don't know how much chance you got to
talk to Steven Ottens about Geodan's educational project work - he
became a Mapbuilder developer in order to work in a extending it for a
collaborative mapping in schools project. 

I like the idea of being able to offer telascience facilities in a
try-out-and-see, loose affilation to OSGeo kind of a way. I'd like to
hear more about the project outlined at
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Kids_GIS_Portal so that interested
contributors within OSGeo may be able to plug in easily - if this
looks like just a web portal to data view and play with layers, it may
not be so interesting but if this connects to annotation interfaces
and use cases for webmap.js; or to data packaging work which the
education committee has in remit; or to the simple catalogue interface
work in geodata; it would be good to be able to demonstrate the
benefit of being connected to the OSGeo community in terms of what can
be built for teaching, as well as for hosting and marketing reasons.

cheers,


jo