[OSGeo-Edu] Introduction -- Simon Cropper (Botanicus Australia Pty Ltd)

[Jorge Gaspar Sanz Salinas]

On 15 January 2010 00:15, Simon Cropper (Botanicus Australia Pty Ltd)
<scropper at botanicusaustralia.com.au> wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
>
> I have been invited to join this list by Cameron Shorter due to my recent
> efforts in preparing some tutorials for gvSIG. He has asked me to post a
> brief introduction of who I am and an outline of my current obsession.
>
> PREAMBLE
>
> I am a natural resource consultant operating in  South-east Australia. If
> you are interested you can visit my website listed below to see what my core
> business involves.
>
> I use GIS on a daily basis for basic spatial analysis and cartography. So
> simply, I am a user. Weened on Maptitude, I eventually moved to ArcView 3.
> Over the last 2-years I have been actively searching for an alternative for
> ArcView and have tried a wide variety of packages (gvSIG, Kosmo, QGIS,
> OpenJUMP, JUMP, UDig, Grass, FWTools, Ilwis3, Saga and many others).
>
> I don't consider myself an educator, per sae, just a user keen to help
> others understand complex issues and to improve the quality of information
> disseminated in my industry. I have run free community forums (now defunct),
> supplied comprehensive lists to web resources (now defunct) and even created
> an email notification service for the natural resource management industry
> in Australia (EcoAlert). None have really taken off, considering the
> potential audience of up to 20,000 people. The most successful education
> instrument I have found is my newsletter EcoRamblings. I base this comment
> on the website statistics which show the most common downloads are of this
> newsletter.
>
> CURRENT OBSESSION
>
> Of late, I have been particularly taken by gvSIG as it is the first Open
> Source GIS package I have been able to use to complete the workflow of a
> standard flora and fauna survey from data acquisition through to map
> production. I posted my praises on the gvSIG-International list server late
> last year if anyone is interested (LINK).
>
> This post was shortly followed by a request to put something in the OSGeo
> Journal, which I happily agreed, and soon after I submitted an article based
> on this post. This article differs in that it better articulates the actual
> workflow of a typical project by specifying all the things done on a GIS
> package in order to finish a project (e.g. data acquisition, topology
> checks, shapefile creation, reprojection, mapping production, ...). It is
> hoped that this article will be published in the next issue but as yet the
> editing process has not begun so I not sure this will happen.
>
> The logical progression from this base was to further document how each step
> in my workflow was achieved using gvSIG and so I began creating detailed
> tutorials showing how I completed each step. The tutorials are generally
> 10-15 pages long with copious screen dumps augmented with arrows, circles
> and explanatory text. The text has been written assuming that the reader is
> not GIS literate, in fact I am aiming for the multitude of people that would
> love to use GIS packages, but still rely on colour pencils on topo maps and
> an understanding client. In all, I expect to have 10-15 workflow tutorials
> and 2-3 introductory tutorials. The 'voice' is similar to that used in my
> popular newsletter EcoRamblings (that is casual, informative, first person).
>
> A draft webpage is being prepared to get some of the tutorials out there
> quickly but eventually the final webpage will be formated so the tutorials
> 'hang-off' the workflow process. This more detailed version is dependent on
> when the OSGeo Journal Article is to be published, as I don't want to
> preempt the publication of this article with similar text in a webpage.
>
> In order to ensure the tutorials are relevant the target audience, I am in
> the process of sourcing some high resolution vector and raster data that can
> be legally used as a backdrop to my tutorials. Data comparable to what I use
> every day -- high resolution ECW data, cadastral data, geology maps,
> vegetation maps, etc and relevant to the area I work (SE Australia). I am
> hoping that if I can acquire this information it will be able to be bundled
> and placed on my website for download by people trying to follow the
> tutorials. I am aiming to have this information available on a CC license.
> Once this dataset is acquired I will go into full production of the various
> task specific tutorials. Tutorials will be released as they are completed.
>
> I hope this information is of use. I will endevour to keep this posted as
> information is released.
> --
>
> Cheers Simon
>
> Simon Cropper
> Botanicus Australia Pty Ltd
> PO Box 160, Sunshine, Victoria 3020.
> P: 9311 5822. M: 041 830 3437.
> mailto: scropper at botanicusaustralia.com.au
> web: www.botanicusaustralia.com.au
>
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>
>


Hi, just a quick note to support Simon

He's doing an amazing work on international list of gvSIG, with dozens
of feature requests, bugs and comments and really interesting threads
about gvSIG documentation. He's the kind of proactive user any project
should be proud to have on its community (I am).

Here in Valencia some people think he never sleeps, and others think
that in fact Simon is a facade for an entire group of people :-)

Cheers!!

-- 
Jorge Gaspar Sanz Salinas
Ingeniero en Geodesia y Cartografía
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Jorge_Sanz