[Ica-osgeo-labs] ICA-OSGeo labs Advisory Board updates

[Suchith Anand]

Dear All,
 
I would like to share with you updates from  our first Advisory Board meeting last month . It was great to see the excellent range of ideas put forward by members, but because of short time we couldn’t cover many of them, so we have now setup small task groups of Advisory Board members and nodal contacts to develop ideas for each topic and come up with set of recommendations that we can take forward
 
 
·         Task group for "Criteria" (Helena Mitasova, Charlie Schweik, Anne Ghisla)
 
 " What entitles an institution to apply for becoming part of the ICA-OSGeo Labs? Can this be a company as well?"
 
So far except we welcomed   university/education institutions who have contacted us. Our MoU states that "we share the goal of developing on a global basis collaboration opportunities for academia, industry and government organisations in open source GIS software and data" 

So how can we welcome new labs from not only universities/educational institutes but also from industry, government organisations interested to join the initiative. For example, just looking at training providers in UK alone there are many industry providers who have been running excellent short training programs on Open Source GIS http://www.osgeo.org/uk/training_providers  , so we should think of ideas for bringing together not just universities but also industry and govt. organisations so we can build more synergies and build momentum. The group will  put forward  definition for the criteria to reflect the ICA-OSGeo MoU and then update our website info etc.
 
 
·         Task group for Government (both local and national) & Industry Engagement (Geoff Zeiss, Gavin Fleming, Rafael Moreno, Jeroen Ticheler)
 
One of things that many members raised was though the ICA-OSGeo MoU states the objective that "Both parties to this MOU share the goal of developing on a global basis collaboration opportunities for academia, industry and government organizations in open source GIS software and data." currently out of the 70 nodes established is only universities/educational. We haven’t been able to include in this initiative Government organisations and Industry (esp for their training requirements). If we want to make this initiative as collaboration building for  academia, industry and government organizations in open source GIS software and data, we need to expand our focus. 
 
·         Task group for Open Challenges (Sven Schade, Suchith Anand, Venkatesh Raghavan, Maria Brovelli) 
 
We liked the idea emailed by Sven  about "a ICA-OSGeo list of open challenges", which the various labs might take up and address throughout the year?"  One of the points pointed out by many members is having a logo for the "Geo4All" initiative. It was decided to run an open competition to find the logo as the first Open Challenge.  For our logo we will use "Geo4All" and we will be sending an open competition call to the community to design the logo. Maria’s NASA World wind Europa Challenge is a good example we can model for future ideas.
 
 
·         Task group for non-traditional education (Sergio Acosta y Lara, Phillip Davis, Chris Pettit)
 
MOOCs and other related developments need to be looked into and the work done by Phillip on "Engaging Two Year Community and Technical Colleges in the US in FOSS4G " and Sergio on "gvSIG Batovi" is of interest for wider capacity building programs globally.
 
 
·         Task group for Wider engagement (Marguerite Madden, Josef Strobl, Arnulf Christl, Mike Jackson)
 
We need to think of more ideas for engaging more closely with other organisations like ISPRS, OGC, GSDI, UN etc. There are many areas of synergies in capacity building/ training activities etc.
 
 
·         Task group for more visibility (Georg Gartner , Jeff McKenna)
 
Georg and Jeff as ICA and OSGeo Presidents will help us making the initiative more visible both in ICA and OSGeo and the wider communities.
 
 
·      Website revisions (All)

We are also discussing ideas on the revised website text to reflect , refine and build upon ideas for future. The index page of the website is very important to convey who we are, what we do and why we care for this.


Once we have all ideas collated from task groups, we will share with all of you. Once again, i would to thank all our AB members for their contributions and whose collective wisdom is very important for helping guide us for the future.

I would also like to bring to your attention that on 2nd Sep 2014 (in parallel to OSGIS 2014), we are working to organise a dedicated event on "Building up Open Access, Open Education and Open Data for Open Science" bringing together key players from the Open Data, Open Access and Open Education communities for building synergies with Geo4All initiative. This will provide us good opportunity and will be a springboard for accelerating future developments. I will be sending more details soon.

Best wishes,

Suchith
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