[OSGeo-Edu] Our proposed educational content and management standard!

[cschweik at pubpol.umass.edu]

Greetings OSGeo Education list members:

Happy New Year! 2008's going to be a great year for our group. (Note: To keep
this manageable, I'm going to send two emails out. This one is about standardize
content and its management, the other will be on broader edu committee tasks.)

Our proposal to standardize OSGeo educational content and version control
management is at
http://wiki.osgeo.org/images/3/3a/A_Proposal_for_OSGEO_Edu_Authoring_Summary.pdf

The main benefits are (1) a structured writing approach and (2) the ability to
easily create multiple formats from a single source file. This second benefit
would allow relatively easy creation of, for example, a book from various
selected OSGeo edu modules, following a similar structure and format.

This has taken significant research/work on our end. What we want from you is:

1) Comments or a general vote of OK so that we can implement; and
2) A commitment from some who have edu material or are writing edu material to
follow this standard so we build a searchable database of standardized
educational content over the next 6 months.

Wouldn't it be **WONDERFUL**, if by October in South Africa we have a searchable
database of standardized content to present? This goal IS achievable and would
be a huge leap forward for our group.

SO,

- PLEASE REVIEW THE PROPOSAL. COMMENTS APPRECIATED.
- IF IT LOOKS OK I'D LIKE TO SUGGEST A COMMITTEE VOTE TO MOVE FORWARD TO
IMPLEMENTATION.

We want to move forward. Can we decide by Jan 23rd before I leave email for 2
weeks? If we need to set up an IRC to discuss, let me know.

Thanks all!

Charlie Schweik (UMass Amherst, education committee chair for any new list
members)

for

Ned Horning (American Museum of Natural History, edu committee co-chair; Ned
provided a lot of the initial thinking here)
Alexander (Sasha) Stepanov (UMass Amherst. Sasha did much of the research/hard
work here)
Maili Page (UMass Amherst; helping develop/test the tutorials)