[OSGeo-Edu] Denver "Content Sprint" ideas

[Ian Turton]

On 21 February 2011 11:01, Charlie Schweik <cschweik at pubpol.umass.edu> wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> Last year, there was the suggestion to develop "exercise workbooks" that
> provided material for all of the different OS options. That is, similar
> exercises for each of the different OS Desktop GIS packages, or Web
> packages. I started these two wiki pages but not much has happened since
> then:
>
> 1)   OS desktop GIS exercises
> (http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Desktop_GIS_exercises)
> 2)   Web-based GIS exercises
> (http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Web_GIS_lab_exercises)
>
> I think we should start with some exercises of the basics. I have a bunch of
> exercises for desktop GIS I am using for my undergraduate Spatial
> Technologies class based on QGIS that uses freely available data from our
> state GIS agency, MassGIS (www.mass.gov/mgis). The list on #1 above lists
> some of these.

I have some web GIS snippets (and a whole class) that could probably
go in (assuming the licences match).
> The idea would be that we would:
>
> A) Develop the template format for all of these exercises to take. My strong
> preference would be to use Open Office (.odt) as the format because it would
> be the easiest to use for the broadest group of potential contributors. Some
> will remember we looked into other formats several years ago and that effort
> didn't go anywhere.

Please can we go for a plain text format rather than a word processor.
With the advent of tools like PanDoc
(http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) we can still make word processor
output as/if needed or go directly through a text processor to nice
PDF output. There is even a tool to convert ODT to markdown
(http://www.freewisdom.org/projects/python-markdown/odt2txt) Plus we
can automatically pull in the existing documents from the live DVD
effort to give some basic startup documents.

The advantages also mean we can store the documents in svn which makes
maintenance much easier. (and might help with translation work but
I'll let Cameron comment about that).

> Reactions? Does this seem like the right direction for the "Content Sprint"?
> Whose willing to join this effort?

I'm in for helping but I'm not sure I have the time to lead.

Ian
-- 
Ian Turton