[OSGeo-Edu] Getting ready for FOSS4Geo Sydney Birds of a Feather edu meeting

[Charlie Schweik]

Dear OSGeo Edu colleagues

(Sorry for a longish email)

With the FOSS4Geo conference coming up next week, I thought I’d try and 
help focus our group in preparation for the Birds of a Feather meeting. 
I hope whoever is in Sydney and interested in furthering the 
education/curriculum efforts, you’ll sign up on the wiki [1]. Thanks for 
Scott Mitchell, Venka Ragavan and Maria Brovelli for helping run that 
given I won't be there. Perhaps one of you could do a report back on Edu 
activities and what we are planning now to the OSGeo open session if 
there is one (I'm assuming there will be). Let me know if you want 
talking points.

But before I go on, I’d like to apologize to the group for my lack of 
leadership over the last six months. The short of it is I have been the 
primary caretaker of my mother, who has been seriously ill and in and 
out of hospitals 6 times since June. I’m hoping that situation will get 
better, but it has taken up a lot of my time. If you’d let me, I’m quite 
willing to continue my role as the OSGeo edu chair, but given my 
performance of late I am quite willing to step down if the group would 
like new leadership. This might be a topic of discussion for the BOF and 
whether an election for a new chair is in order.

Now, to substance. I’ve edited our groups “to do list” on the OSGeo 
wiki, and am suggesting that we as a group focus now on the “Curriculum” 
discussion we’ve been having over email.

Please see [2]

What I’m suggesting is that people in Sydney have a discussion on this 
proposal.

What do you all think? If you all agree, should we try rapidly to find 
some possible curriculum guidance in advance of next week?

Lastly, a couple old tasks that I removed but still wonder about is:

1) Efforts to connect better OSGeo Local groups to education efforts;
2) Efforts to connect better to OSGeo software groups somehow; and
3) The FreeGIS Book - Victor's effort and the need for whatever is 
written to be translated to English

Are these worthy of staying on our task list? And any other 
tasks/initiatives people want to take on this next year that I haven't 
listed? Feel free to add it to the todo list wiki page [2]

Finally, if anyone is willing to take on a kind of subcommittee chair on 
any of these initiatives I would greatly appreciate it... ;-)

Charlie

[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/FOSS4G_2009_BirdsOfAFeather
[2] 
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Education_Committee_Work_Program#PROPOSED_INITIATIVE_FOR_2009-2010_-_OS_GEO_CURRICULUM 


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