[OSGeo-Edu] Education committee/ BoF meeting/workshop in FOSS4G2006

[Charlie Schweik]

On Mon, 2006-08-14 at 10:28 +0300, Ari Jolma wrote:
> In the last edu committee meeting I suggested to have a real life
> meeting in Lausanne. At least Markus agreed that Tuesday, after the
> workshops would work.
> 
> So this is a suggestion and a call for participation in such a meeting.
> The room has to be decided later. Topics to discuss:
> 
> - Cooperation to develop educational materials
> - Should we prepare a grant application for Andrew W. Mellon Foundation?

Unfortunately I can't make it to the meeting in Lausanne... :-(

(Note: The below is coming from both me and Ned Horning.)
 
But regarding the Mellon Foundation. Ned Horning and I had a short
discussion with Chris Mackie, Associate Program Officer for the
Information Technology program of Mellon, as we were reflecting on a
recent call for nominations they had sent out that was due last month.
In this discussion, we mentioned the OSGEO.edu idea and appeared to be
willing to read a short proposal related to OSGeo education. Two if the
things I think we learned were:

1) They'd prefer to support individual institutions.

2) The proposal needs to fall within their program areas - meaning the
list of areas found here: http://www.mellon.org/grant_programs.html. 
The efforts under edu.osgeo probably fit under two: Scholarly
Communication (I've met Donald Waters, the Program chair but don't know
how well he remembers me), and Research in Information Technology
(Chris's Mackie's program).

So, if this group wanted to go for a Mellon grant via Chris' program,
the first step might be to send him a general ~2-3 page proposal
from the edu.OSGEO group on this initial discussion around OSGeo
education that describes the general idea and what components it might
have in it and what organizations are active in it. In it it might say
that the group wants to submit a series of *separate* but somehow
coordinated set of proposals to Mellon and then have maybe a short
paragraph for each sub-component to see if he'd be interested in
receiving a set of 2-page descriptions for each sub-component. This
might give him an opportunity to select subcomponents he sees most
interesting to Mellon.

Hope this is helpful.
 
Charlie