[OSGeo-Edu] New OSGeo education web pages and meeting summary

[cschweik at pubpol.umass.edu]

Greetings OSGeo edu colleagues,

Apologies in advance for a long email.

It was great meeting many of you at FOSS4Geo. (Puneet, we missed you,
but understood why you couldn't make it. We've tried to move forward
and, I think, have made some significant steps.) Here's a status:

1) MEETING MINUTES. For those who weren't there, we had 27 people show
up and ~85% of them were new edu members. Lot's of energy, enthusiasm! There are
minutes to the first BOF which can be found at:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/FOSS4G2007_Education_BOF_minutes. Thanks
to Scott Mitchell at Carlton U. for his note taking.

2) WEB PAGE WRITING. In the second BOF, we did a "wiki sprint" to get
the edu pages updated and fresh. About 8 people were there. Since we only had an
hour, I used my
time tonight to make further changes and have done some pretty extensive
edits. See what you think and feel free to adjust where necessary.

The main page on the OSGeo site (that Tyler has control over) is here:
http://www.osgeo.org/education

The entry point to our pages on the OSGeo wiki is here:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Education_and_Curriculum_Committee

3) TO DOS. We came up with todos for the next 3 months. The list is at
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Education_Committee_Work_Program. Our
goal should be substantial progress beyond this for reporting a year from now in
the South Africa FOSS4Geo conference.

4) ADD YOUR INFORMATION! Finally, please follow the directions on our
main page and enter relevant information for yourself or your
organization (participant list, educational inventory page). Let's see
how fast we can get an inventory built of existing educational content!
Eventually, our hope is to get it into some kind of content management
system, but just getting a list is the first step.

I'll try and follow up early next week with a page describing the task
for the subcommittee on deciding the right platform for content. I'll
also try and encourage people who are not on this mailing list but who
attended the BOF to post information about their content on the
inventory page.

Cheers
Charlie Schweik