[OSGeo-Discuss] Abstract, please look at.

[Helena Mitasova]

It is encouraging to see the live discussion on the topic
related to academic invovlment, so here are some notes based on many
years of work with students on GRASS development and applications:
 

- the first thing that we could probably do is to set-up an annual OSGeo 
prize for the best student work in two or more categories
(e.g.,  development work, applications) - it can be awarded at
the annual conferences but should go beyond travel support for
attending the meeting
 

- I found that developers and users list are good for students
to connect - I usually ask them to subscribe,
 

- regarding dissemination of students work, for GRASS it can be
either put into Add-ons or, if they are working with the core
developers (as mentioned above developers lists are a good place
to get to know them) and code is important, it gets into CVS and
eventually into release.
 

- we may need to overcome the perception that to find a job
in geospatial industry, government or academia you need to know
proprietary systems and you won't get anywhere if you know OSGeo 
software: the proposed job list will be great for this and students can 
even compete for smaller jobs that fit with their academic work
to earn some extra money or take a bigger job and work with their
advisor to make it into PhD thesis. I have a long list of projects
that need to be done and could be done as a semester class project,
Masters or PhD - but funding may not be always available;
 

- let us not create another committe - we can expand
the focus of curricullum committe to education in general -
that would cover curricullum, academia, tutorials, books etc.

Helena
---------------------------------------------------
Helena Mitasova 
                                                   Department of Marine, 
Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC 27695-8208
http://skagit.meas.ncsu.edu/~helena/

Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> Chris Holmes wrote:
> 
>> Eventually I think I would really like to see an 'academic' committee, 
>> focused more on getting academics and indeed students to use and 
>> contribute to open source.  I see this as different from the core 
>> curriculum stuff, which I also think is vitally important.  But 
>> whereas that's focused on using the OS tools to teach, this would be 
>> more oriented towards getting those working in academia involved in 
>> the whole open source process.  The most obvious is academics doing 
>> bleeding edge work, get them to not only use OS packages, but lay out 
>> the mechanisms for them to roll back their changes in.  Lots of code 
>> just gets thrown away, and some of it can be very useful in the OS 
>> world.  The other is to encourage 'students' to see themselves as 
>> potential contributors. Many see their work as not 'real' until they 
>> get in to a paying job, when in reality they do some of the best 
>> work.  Ideally we could capture some of that energy for open source.
> 
> 
> Chris,
> 
> I completely agree!  I think Prof. Ari Jolma was asking about ways of
> better connecting university research work and open source projects
> a number of months ago on one of the mailing lists.  Basically, how to
> setup research projects with open source in a way that the research work
> gets disseminated and put to "real world" use if it goes reasonably well.
> 
> /me seaches through over 100 threads in his in-box that mention Ari Jolma.
> 
> Aha, here it is:
> 
>   http://intevation.de/pipermail/freegis-list/2005-August/002463.html
> 
> Best regards,