[OSGeo-Edu] More on the free GIS book

[Lorenzo Becchi]

>
> (Lorenzo,
> can you help me with this?)
I will.

I do agree with all the plan. Write me privately to share our tasks.

Let's see if some negative but proposing opinion comes out.

ciao
Lorenzo




Victor Olaya Ferrero wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> First of all, I want to say thank you to all of you (specially Charlie and
> Venka) for this nice discussion we are having about the best way to write
> the book, it is being really fruitful for me.
>
> There are many good ideas, and I have been thinking about them a bit. I
> think we are going in the right direction, so here are my thoughts and a
> little proposal to start organizing all this:
>
> I definitely agree with Venka in using different softwares for the book
> and the courses. For the spanish book we are using LaTeX + Subversion,
> which is probably the best option available. Markus is using it for the
> Grass courses he mentioned, and, according to what Helena told me, Markus
> and her used it as well for the Grass book. However, I agree that we
> cannot expect everyone to be able to use LaTeX or learn it just to
> collaborate with us, and that we should accept collaborations in other
> formats (Venka said OpenOffice, but even if someone wants to write in a
> Wiki, we should take those materials and put them into the book as well if
> they are interesting). Converting from ather formats to latex can be a
> tedious and unpleasant task, so that rises a question: who is going to do
> it ? maybe someone wants to volunteer for that (I think it is not likely
> to happen...) but, if that is not the case, then I think that the book
> comitte members should take that task or find a suitable solution. The
> comitee is really an editorial comitee, and its members are (more or less)
> the editors of the book. That means that they should assume some extra
> tasks apart from just writing the book itself, like checking the
> homogeneity of the book, preparing an index or coordinating all authors so
> everything is homogeneous and the book does not look like an unconnected
> collection of chapters. Those are boring tasks, I know...but someone has
> to do them.
>
> As I said, I would love to chair the comitee as Charlie proposed, and I
> understand that it implies assuming this role of editor and having some
> extra compromise with the book. I hope that the rest of the people who
> volunteered for that agree with me.
>
> So, in short, this is my proposal:
>
> 1) I will ask the spanish PSC members about all these, to see how we
> manage the situation, since, as I said, I find the idea of having two
> comitees (on for the book in spanish and one for the book in english)
> terribly awkward an unpractical.
> 2) I will get in contact with all the people who showed interest in
> helping us with the spanish book, to check if they still want to
> participate and, if so, tell them about what is happening here and invite
> them to join this list. As I told you, a few chapters are unassigned, but
> other are assigned to people that did not show much activity since then.
> Those chapters are completely unwritten, so maybe  should be re-assigned
> to people from the english side who are more active, or maybe simply
> co-authored.
> 3)By the end of the week, I will try to have a branch in the cvs(Lorenzo,
> can you help me with this?) with all the LaTeX files, but only with the
> headers (that is, just the name of each chapter), so you can all see it
> and start writing. I will mark the chapters that are already written, or
> at least partially written, so you can focus on the other ones. Before
> starting writing, I think we should work out a bit all the chapter
> assignments. The wiki is great for that. We can simply put the names of
> the chapter, and let the people add their names to those chapters that
> they want to coordinate. If several people show interest in coordinating a
> chapter, they can privately reach an agreement. People wanting to
> collaborate but not wanting to have the responsability of coordinating the
> chapter, should get in contact with its coordinators. This might sound a
> bit rigid, but I think is the best way to have everything properly
> organized. It is also the usual way of writing a book like this. Just
> because it is free does not mean that we should follow a different model.
>
> So give me a week or so (I am a bit busy right now...) to have that ready
> and to talk to the guys on the spanish side...and I hope that we can soon
> start creating new contents for the book.
>
> I would like to hear your opinion about all this, so please send all your
> comments to the mailing list.
>
> Regards (and sorry for the loooong email...)
>
> Victor
>
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