[OSGeo-Discuss] Board Election: Charlie Schweik

[Charlie Schweik]

I've been involved with OSGeo for several years now, trying to help move 
our educational committee forward.

Recently, in the U.S., I attended the Gov 2.0 summit in Washington D.C. 
put on by Tim O'Reilly and others (www.gov2summit.com) which had a 
number of discussions/presentations with some of the major U.S. Federal 
CIO people, among others.  (I'm planning on writing an OSGeo edu blog 
entry on some of the things I saw there...). But what was an overarching 
theme that was resonating throughout that conference was "openness as 
innovation." An example used multiple times was the innovation that has 
emerged (private sector) as a consequence of the GPS system as a 
"platform" for innovating at the endpoints. The importance of geocoding 
and geospatial was another theme, as was openness of data. People on 
this list, of course, know this, and many countries are farther ahead in 
this than the U.S.

The reason I raise this is because OSGeo and the federation of projects 
it represents is a global leader in this area and I see the next 5 years 
as a critical era for the organization.

To me, education around open technologies is key toward this future 
growth.  Over the last 2-years, I've been learning a little about the 
challenges of leading a community of volunteers interested in OSGeo 
education. I don't know how successful I've been -- lots of demands on 
my time like everyone else -- but I've tried. We do have a searchable 
database of educational content that I think many of us should be proud 
of as an example of what we can do as a community.

But one of the things I think we need to do better as a community is 
somehow working with the various software projects on education 
initiatives. Education efforts will promote the software developed by 
OSGeo affiliated projects. In addition, we've started recently a 
conversation about trying to define an educational curriculum around OS 
Geospatial. In my view, we need to be trying to identify "core 
competencies" for OSGeo developers as well as users of the various 
software packages and move, as a community toward developing some system 
of developing these materials together, and sharing and deriving new 
material based on other material.

Empirical work I have not yet published in my forthcoming book on Open 
Source collaboration with statistical analysis of 107,000 Sourceforge 
projects is showing me that projects that are "successful" -- meaning 
they continue to worked on and are not abandoned -- are very often made 
up of small teams of developers. But what we have found to be 
statistically significant is the successful projects have at least 1 
more developer compared to abandoned projects. This tells me that you 
don't need large teams to be productive. But you do need to be able to 
"link" or "connect" two or three people globally who have a passion for 
a project or an idea and also have some of the skills to tackle that 
problem. OSGeo has the "platform" and the global reach to make such 
connections in my view, whether it be in developing software, or 
developing educational material.

My goal, whether it be on the board or in my role trying to move the 
education group forward, is to see if we can harness this productive energy.

Cheers
Charlie Schweik


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