[Ica-osgeo-labs] Defining criteria for REL membership

Mon Jun 1 01:39:41 PDT 2015

Hi Cameron,

Thanks for this timely and informative email which is very important for planning the future. It will be good to include ideas from OSGeo Live experience to help us refine and evaluvate the criteria as we grow. We started on this education initiative with only very basic ideas and so we need to learn and adapt as we expand. In fact,  the initial target when we started ICA-OSGeo MoU was to work to help establish 5 labs in 5 years (even that we were laughed at!). But thanks to the amazing colleagues who joined and contributed thier efforts, we were able to build lot of momentum much beyond any of our expectations. 

Yes,  the only current membership requirement is to acknowledge an intent to incorporate ICA-OSGeo MoU principles and follow the membership criteria,  but till now we did not have any means to follow up on the progress of each lab. This exercise to find the inactive ones is the first step to refine the membership process. We have now given enough time for the inactive ones to respond and the regional chairs will now remove the inactive ones from the list.

The membership to ICA-OSGeo-ISPRS labs is free and open to all universities/educational institutes BUT they do have the responsibility to follow and contribute to the "Geo for All" membership principles http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Geoforall_criteria  as they are representing three great Geo organisations (ICA, OSGeo and ISPRS). So i think it is reasonable to ask for an yearly annual report from the responsible contact of each ICA-OSGeo-ISPRS lab with atleast the basic info that you suggested 

** Details of Lab staff
** Details of your training courses/programs  based upon OSGeo Software
** Details of your training material is made available under an Open License
** Details of any publications 
** Details of any funding awarding, student achievements etc
** Roughly how many staff/students in your university beniffited from OSGeo software this year
** Any more ideas

We want to make sure the reporting form is simple and easy to fill and the good news is through our open call for volunteers to help for our website, we have now got 5 excellent volunteers and once we finalize the criteria for annual reporting , we can get one of them to create this form for us. My suggestion is if this form input can also be in some way made to be published as a blog entry to our website, it will be excellent as then it will help others in the network to also get an idea of what each lab is doing and build collaboration opportunities. Also it helps with archiving the progress of each lab. Could i request your help in refining these criteria for us?

Also as we have some volunteers, we can now request them to help any of our labs (esp. in developing countries) who had did not have the resources to create thier own website etc to let us know and we can get some of them to help them.

So all ideas/inputs welcome.

Suchith

________________________________________
From: ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Cameron Shorter [cameron.shorter at gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, May 31, 2015 11:39 PM
To: ica-osgeo-labs at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [Ica-osgeo-labs] Defining criteria for REL membership

Hi all,
I think that the OSGeo Education community has grown to the level where
it will help to define what REL membership means, and acknowledge the
members who meet membership criteria.

Am I right in understanding that the only current membership requirement
is to acknowledge an intent to incorporate OSGeo principles into future
training programs? This is very easy to achieve.  Based on the email
thread below, it appears their may be 20 inactive labs?

I suggest that it is time to define best practices for REL members, then
list members that meet this criteria.
Other members can then be labeled as "setting up" or "incubating" or
similar.

Having such criteria for membership in place, matched by defining the
value of being a member, should help each institution in bidding for
educational funding within your organisation.

Here is a rough idea:

Membership involves:
** Your training courses are based upon OSGeo Software
** Your training material is made available under an Open License
** You will actively aim to build upon prior training material rather
than creating your own from scratch
** When you build upon prior material, you will help incorporate it back
into the commons baseline
** If you are a core contributor, you will help others incorporate their
improvements into your baseline.

Business case for involvement:
** Open Source GIS Software is robust and effective for professionals
and students should learn about it.
** Open Source GIS Software is rapidly innovating, and as such, needs to
be constantly maintained.
** It is more cost effective to share maintenance with an international
community of experts rather than develop on our own.

We successfully use these principles for both OSGeo Incubation and the
OSGeo-Live project:
http://cameronshorter.blogspot.com/2011/06/memoirs-of-cat-herder-coordinating.html

On 1/06/2015 12:34 am, Helena Mitasova wrote:
> This is just a reminder that today is the deadline for updating your entry in the OSGeo REL network wiki table
>
> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Edu_current_initiatives#sortable_table_id_0
>
> - we still have over 20 labs with statement “in the process of being established” that is more than one year old.
>
> Thank you, Helena
>
>
>> Dear members of the OSGeo REL network,
>>
>> the advisory board has approved formalized conditions of the ICA-OSGeo-ISPRS lab network membership.
>> The document can be found here
>>
>> http://www.geoforall.org/how_to_join/
>>
>> It is now important to make sure that all members of the network, including the small and large labs confirm their membership by updating the information in the wiki table:
>>
>> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Edu_current_initiatives#sortable_table_id_0
>>
>> If everything there is correct, up to date and you have there links to your active OSGeo lab website, you don't need to do anything.
>>
>> If you still have "in process of being established" or no link at all, please fill in the column "Notes" with an update on where you are in the process.
>>
>> We need your update by the end of May 2015, after that the regional chairs will start contacting the members who seem to be inactive to see whether they are still interested.
>> Please, contact your regional chairs if you need any help with updates,
>>
>> Helena
>>
>>
>> Helena Mitasova
>> Professor at the Department of Marine,
>> Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences
>> and Center for Geospatial Analytics
>> North Carolina State University
>> Raleigh, NC 27695-8208
>> hmitaso at ncsu.edu
>> http://geospatial.ncsu.edu/osgeorel/
>> "All electronic mail messages in connection with State business which are sent to or received by this account are subject to the NC Public Records Law and may be disclosed to third parties."
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> ica-osgeo-labs mailing list
>> ica-osgeo-labs at lists.osgeo.org
>> http://lists.osgeo.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ica-osgeo-labs
> Helena Mitasova
> Professor at the Department of Marine,
> Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences
> and Center for Geospatial Analytics
> North Carolina State University
> Raleigh, NC 27695-8208
> hmitaso at ncsu.edu
> http://geospatial.ncsu.edu/osgeorel/
> "All electronic mail messages in connection with State business which are sent to or received by this account are subject to the NC Public Records Law and may be disclosed to third parties.”
>
> _______________________________________________
> ica-osgeo-labs mailing list
> ica-osgeo-labs at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ica-osgeo-labs

--
Cameron Shorter,
Software and Data Solutions Manager
LISAsoft
Suite 112, Jones Bay Wharf,
26 - 32 Pirrama Rd, Pyrmont NSW 2009

P +61 2 9009 5000,  W www.lisasoft.com,  F +61 2 9009 5099

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