[FOSS4G-Oceania] FOSS4G Workshops and OSGeo-Live

[John Bryant]

My opinion is that we should go for participants bringing their own laptop.
This is the norm that I've experienced in the last few years, and
personally I'd prefer to use my own computer when attending a workshop. The
two workshops I attended recently at FOSS4G-NA worked well with
instructions sent to participants ahead of time. However, I suspect this
works better in advanced workshops where participants are likely more
savvy/experienced and can troubleshoot installation problems.

Last year at an R workshop, I did run into installation problems on the day
of the workshop, and OSGeo-LIVE came in very handy.

Perhaps we encourage workshop presenters to consider how the OSGeo-LIVE
distro could help mitigate the installation problem, and communicate to
their participants accordingly.

I'd also be in favour of promoting the distro more generally to conf
attendees.

Cheers
John


On Fri, 22 Jun 2018 at 14:05, Cameron Shorter <cameron.shorter at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Am I right in understanding that workshop participants will be expected
> to bring their own laptop? Consistent feedback in Lessons Learned from
> past FOSS4G workshops is that getting a classroom full of
> "bring-your-own-laptops" is both error prone and time consuming, often
> taking the first hour of the workshop.
>
> Advice usually comes back to "it is best to have all the computers
> pre-installed with software required". This puts a hefty burden on
> workshop organisors and presenters to source computers and set them all
> up with software.
>
> Something that many of the conferences have started doing is installing
> the OSGeo-Live on all workshop computers. OSGeo-Live is a Lubuntu linux
> distribution which comes pre-installed with ~ 50 of the best OSGeo
> applications, along with sample data. It can either be booted from a
> USB, or installed into a Virtual Machine. I'd suggest that we should be
> considering this for our workshops too, and encouraging workshop
> presenters to make use of OSGeo-Live.
>
> We should also encourage all participants to install OSGeo-Live onto the
> laptop before coming to the conference, and we should have a stack of
> spare OSGeo-Live USBs floating around for those people who haven't got
> themselves setup.
>
> (I should declare here my personal vested interest in OSGeo-Live, as I'm
> one of the founders of the project - it started as part of the FOSS4G
> 2009 conference in Sydney).
>
> --
> Cameron Shorter
> Technology Demystifier
> Open Technologies and Geospatial Consultant
>
> M +61 (0) 419 142 254
>
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