[Board] GeoForAll Budget 2018

[Suchith Anand]

Dear Board,

On behalf of GeoForAll, I wish to submit the budget for 2018 for your consideration.

GeoForAll’s focus is on education and we have been working to enable geoeducation opportunities for all. Esp. in developing countries we now are seeing real progress being made. We see students not just as future of OSGeo but current leaders of OSGeo.

FOSS4G conferences have been a great vehicle to reach out to all communities and we have been using this to provide more participation for students to present their ideas to the world. Students are also contributing hugely to the various OSGeo software projects. We have been discussing many ideas on how we can enable more participation of students and also provide recognition to their contributions. The Student Awards at FOSS4G conferences are the right instrument to enable this.

Based on this, I am proposing the following for GeoForAll budget 2018

GeoForAll Student awards for FOSS4G events will be 500 USD per event (both local and global). Distributed as follows
First prize -250 USD ;Second prize - 150 USD; Third prize -100 USD

We will arrange for max. 4 FOSS4G events to be supported for student awards per year (these will be FOSS4G regional events or other events like gvSIG conference etc which have a dedicated Open source Geo Track and LOC willing to run the award event. This will help us provide more global distribution for supporting student excellence.

The main deliverable for any LOC wishing to take up this is to ensure there is an LOC contact responsible for running the student awards  with criteria setup etc and award ceremony done at the closing ceremony and awards given to winners.

Total budget  - 2000 USD

As 2018 FOSS4G Global event is happening in Africa, it is a great opportunity for widening participation for more students in Africa, so I am also requesting OSGeo Board to consider some of the ideas generated in the discussions for enabling more student participation  [1]  and plan appropriately. There is no need to rush into any decision, but I request that there is discussions take place.

We had some online discussion on ideas for this [1]  and  Mark Iliffe (Chair of FOSS4G 2018) has  volunteered to administer (on behalf of LOC Dar)  directly the $2k from the OSGeo board for this . We need to be careful not to do anything that undermines the Travel Grant program structures that are already  in place . I will hope that Mark and LOC will send a detailed plan for this later on their ideas and then Board can decide as appropriate.

I believe having FOSS4G in Africa in 2018, is a great opportunity esp. for the students in local universities there to ever get the opportunity to be at a  Global FOSS4G event and learn new ideas to help them develop.  This $2k can be used to support providing free registration  to eligible students in local universities will help them attend and help maximum impact for more students.

I thank everyone for your inputs and I now leave this to the community and Board to discuss and take forward as appropriate.

Best wishes,

Suchith

[1] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/geoforall/2017-November/004310.html




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