[Board] Student Award initiative

[Suchith Anand]

Maxi,

Thanks for your feedbacks and ideas. My answers below

1. Sure , let us name it OSGeo Student Awards Initiative.

2. "Giving the money to support the participation of winner to international conferences so that they can meet the community and learn"  is good idea. My suggestion is to leave the implementation details to the respective LOCs. That will give them the flexibility to decide which is the best way to distribute the awards for thier particular conference to make maximum impact. For example maybe LOC1 might want to divide the 1k USD to 5 prizes so 5 students get bit of support or another LOC2 might decide to allocate to one student only.  The Chair of the LOC should send a summary of the Awards to the OSGeo Board after the conference.

I also hope the LOCs will be inspired to actively find other sponsors to further build value for the Student Awards. For example, we already know that for FOSS4G 2015 conference in addition to OSGeo’s $1,000 , the FOSS4G Seoul LOC’s have kindly added their $1,500 contribution to this. If any other sponsors want to give awards directly to the students, the LOC could make the necessary arrangements. 

I agree with Jeroen's suggestion, that let us start small, learn and then expand . So if everyone agrees, let us start with FOSS4G Global, FOSS4G-Europe and FOSS4G-NA. Once the LOCs of these three events know that there will be a support of 1k USD for their conference specifically to support Student Awards, i am confident that they will make the necessary arrangements to ensure stronger participation of students in the conferences and also honour their contributions to OSGeo and to wider Open Education initiatives.

Best wishes,

Suchith

________________________________________
From: board-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [board-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Massimiliano Cannata [massimiliano.cannata at supsi.ch]
Sent: Sunday, March 08, 2015 5:17 PM
To: Jeff McKenna
Cc: OSGeo Board
Subject: Re: [Board] Student Award initiative

Jeff, suchith,
I agree to provide money to start student award, which is very important in my opinion.

Frankly speacking,  my concerns are about:
1) osgeo is giving money for prize, and i see this a way also to fidelize youngs to our association and take part of the community, so i would like to see the award in the name of osgeo. Otherwise if it is in the name of others, they have to contribute equally.

2) i see the potential of bracking down prizes to conferences where few competitors are concurring. In these cases I would rather give money to support the participation of winner to international conferences so that they can meet the community and learn

Just for the record, during he last meeting i suggested to approve the seed money and then decide case to case based on further specification.

Btw, i think that having 5k is a good starting point.

Maxi

Il giorno 08/mar/2015 14:24, "Jeff McKenna" <jmckenna at gatewaygeomatics.com<mailto:jmckenna at gatewaygeomatics.com>> ha scritto:
Thanks for this message Suchith.  Some members of the Board apparently still have concerns, and I have asked them to directly respond to you with their concerns.  Board: please do reply to this message if you have questions for Suchith and the GeoForAll community.

I personally feel that we the Board should support this Student Award initiative, and provide the 10k in seed funds for awards.  The important point here is to give appreciation for students who push FOSS4G in their research.  Students can use the awards as a way to get further funding for their research, and also for continuing onto the next graduate level of their studies.  And our community benefits by having yet another passionate advocate for FOSS4G.  Win-win.

Thank you Board.

-jeff





On 2015-03-07 2:40 PM, Suchith Anand wrote:
Dear Board,

Please let us know what improvements/changes you want for the Student Award initiative. As i told before , if you have specific ideas that need to be in place please suggest them and we are happy to implement any changes needed.

We have been trying to get as much inputs from the community and all inputs we got we have added including to start small (with three events - FOSS4G, FOSS4G-Europe and FOSS4G-NA)

We have put in lot of efforts to build up momentum for Openness in GeoEducation over the years and now we are getting real momentum building up in our Open Geo Education activities globally . It has been combined efforts of all colleagues in OSGeo, ICA and ISPRS  who all come together for the first time on this "Geo for All" mission of making Geospatial Education and opportunities available for all that made this momentum possible.

I really hope we can make this Student Awards happen. It doesn't matter which form it takes shape  but please make it happen.

Best wishes,

Suchith



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