[OSGeo-Edu] Free GIS book

[Victor Olaya Ferrero]

Hi all,

As Charlie said, we have already been talking about an strategy to
coordinate both the english and the spanish team, but it seems difficult
to find a good solution.

Venka, it is good to know that you have someone who can help with the
translation, but it is not yet a good moment to start translating. It is
true that we have 300+ pages already written, but we do not have any
chapter finished, they all need to be reviewed and many sections are still
missing, so is a bit useless to translate them now (IMHO). Better to wait
until they are more or less finished.

I think that the best way to collaborate is to split the work we still
have to do. Many chapters are yet unwritten, and some of them do not even
have a main author assigned (others might have it but that does not mean
that the author is going to write it, just that someone showed interest in
being the main author...). My proposal is to translate the outline so you
can see which chapters are not written yet, and everyone who is interested
can start writing them (we have a more hyerarchical structure regarding
people participating in chapters, and I encourage you to have something
similar, but that can also be discussed...)

In the end, we will have a book with some chapters in spanish and some
others in english. That might sound weird, but is the only way of avoiding
redundancy in our work. After that, it should not be difficult to
translate from english to spanish and viceversa, and we will have both
books ready.

To encourage authors to work on these chapters, I think that the ideas
that Charlie is proposing are really good, and it should be easier to
apply them on the english side...

If you think this is a good strategy, I can translate all our documents
(outline of the book, guidelines for authors, philosophy of the
project...) so we will all work under a common framework (if your student
can help me with this, Venka, I would appreciate it...)

Regarding the subcomitee, I will be pleased to chair it if you consider
that I should, but don't forget that we already have a Project Steering
Comitee for the spanish book, and I am part of it. If we are going to work
together, it would be better to have just one comitee for the book, not
two of them. The other two members of the spanish PSC are Jorge Gaspar
Sanz and Daniel Orellana. I think Jorge is suscribed to this list, but I
am afraid Daniel is not. I should talk to them about this, I guess.

Looking forward to hearing you opinion on this.

Regards

Victor

p.s. I'm sorry to be a bit pesimistic...but having a first draft ready for
the Cape Town meeting does not sound really feasible to me :-( We'll
see....