[Ica-osgeo-labs] Geo4All School Network

Sat Feb 20 08:46:18 PST 2016

Hi Chris,

It was great to discuss ideas in our telemeeting last week and many thanks for this detailed answers to my queries. It is greatly helpful. Your efforts for creating this amazing educational platform is truly remarkable and i thank you for that. I also thank you for assuring your intention to have MapStory.org be free to use for everyone on earth, forever. This is exactly what we want to know. We are keen that any educational plaform and tools that our educators and students depend are fully free and open in the long term and that was why i had been asking all these questions. I hope you understand my thinking.

In fact, a free and open educational platform which is easy to use by non-experts was the key missing piece for our Geo4All school education and MapStory brings to us excellent synergies and we are grateful for your help and support for us. I only wanted to inform you from the information i could gather so far (please correct me if i am wrong) that  i do have concerns esp. of Geo4All depending on  Cesium (even if indirectly)  for our educational needs as there is uncertainity of thier future directions and plans and if  there might be pricing conditions etc for use in the future which might be beyond your or MapStory Foundation's control , hence i would like to flag this and request you to please consider using other free and open 3D virtual globes, so we all can be assured that there will no changes in conditions for the education platforms we use in the long term. For example, we have been working over many years with Patrick and colleagues at WorldWind and now i understand that they are working to be part of OSGeo Live etc, so we can make sure there will be different free and open choices available for us. As you are only making this decision on 3D virtual globles , please consider other options like NASA WW and other open 3D virtual globes. Please discuss with Patrick and others on how they can support us.

For education,  i believe that  Open educational Principles are fundamental to empower people and communities to make sure future generations are fully empowered [1].  There are many examples that helped us reach this decision.  Randal Hale gave of one example [2] on the issues on updates etc faced by a particular high school in USA.  I thought it is NOT a local problem but  a wider education problem that as educators we need to be aware of. That example was a real eye opener of the long term costs/sustainability issues of properitory GIS software in geoeducation and hence i decided to take action and contact AAG [3] when i learnt they were planning to use properitery GIS only for their geoeducation program and humbly requesting AAG to include open principles in Geoeducation and make use of FOSS4G tools. If the  vendor decides to withdraw or change the conditions of thier offer to schools now or at any stage in the future what will happen to the poor schools. This is my biggest worry. Basically schools will be at the mercy of the  vendor. The vendor can change thier mind any time.

As part of my research work at the University of Nottingham over the last 10 years,  i had the opportunity to  work with many different organisations in various research projects from not for profit foundations to properitary companies and i think everyone has their right to be part and contribute thier value addition to the wider geo ecosystem . Having many players is key for ensuring strong competition and making sure there are no monopolies created. So please understand that I have no personal problem with Cesium or any other open source  or properitary companies.

It is also important they all companies play by the rules (it doesnt matter if they are open source company or properitary company) , noone should not use thier dominant market position to create monopoly directly or indirectly. That was why we decided to educate the geocommunity when there was efforts to undermine Open standards in Lidar for example [4], [5]. All this is based on our supporting Open principles in education. So i only wanted you to be aware of the issue and please explore other free and open  options for 3D virtual globes in Map Story and we are looking forward to work with you on this. I will request Patrick and others in our communiy who are more knowledgeable in 3D virtual globes to be in contact with you directly for this. Patrick will also be writing a short article comparing the various 3D virual globes (both open source and properitary) for our next Geo4All newsletter. I think this will be a good way to educate the wider geocommunity on the various functionalities of these tools and make informed choices.

I  see MapStory as a key platform for us to expand spatial literacy education in schools globally and link ideas connecting our the other school initiatives like WorldBridge etc. Also MapStory is good educational platform for our universities also for doing short student projects. For example, Silvana Comboim and Mike Finn of ICA are organising a Geo4All cartographic challenge  on How Openness can help to reduce inequality [6] and rather than having a poster, i think MapStory will be a good platform to build real examples with spatio-temporal contexts for this. So i am looking forward to your ideas on how we can use MapStory for this Geo4All Cartographic Challenge. I will connect you with Silvana and Mike so we can discuss ideas for this.

Thank you once again for your kind understanding and taking your time to clarify details and assuring us your intention to have MapStory.org be free to use for everyone on earth, forever . I am truly grateful for that and we are looking forward to work with you and MapStory Foundation in our common education mission.

Best wishes,

Suchith

[1] http://opensourcegeospatial.icaci.org/2016/02/future-of-gis-should-be-empowerment-not-enslavement-examples-needed-for-geo4all-newsletter
[2] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/2015-June/014310.html
[3] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/ica-osgeo-labs/2015-June/001742.html
[4] http://www.osgeo.org/node/1518
[5] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/LIDAR_Format_Letter
[6] http://opensourcegeospatial.icaci.org/2016/02/geo4all-cartographic-challenge-how-openness-can-help-to-reduce-inequality/

________________________________
From: Christopher Tucker [tucker at mapstory.org]
Sent: Friday, February 19, 2016 5:34 AM
To: Suchith Anand
Cc: ica-osgeo-labs at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: Geo4All School Network

Suchith,

Thanks to all of you who joined the call the other day.  I appreciate the opportunity you provided for me to explain the aspirations of MapStory.org<http://MapStory.org>, the MapStory Foundation, the open source GeoNode platform we use, and the open licensing regimes that we have for both our software and the content (both StoryLayers and MapStories) contributed to the platform by people around the world.  Your questions provided me great insight in to what the GeoForAll community seeks to accomplish, and the ways in which MapStory.org<http://MapStory.org> might evolve over time to meet these goals.

To answer your questions specifically and pointedly:

1)  The MapStory Foundation was built as a 501c3 non-profit educational charity, inspired by the Wikimedia Foundation.  Just as the Wikimedia Foundation has the fiduciary responsibility to look after the care and feeding of www.wikipedia.org<http://www.wikipedia.org> and other various WikiMedia projects, the MapStory Foundation has the responsibility of looking after the care and feeding of MapStory.org<http://MapStory.org>.

2)  Just as Wikipedia.org<http://Wikipedia.org> was built upon the free and open source MediaWiki software project, MapStory.org<http://MapStory.org> was built upon the free and open source GeoNode project (www.geonode.org<http://www.geonode.org>).  All of the MapStory Foundation’s investment in new GeoNode capability has been intended for core committal back in to the GeoNode.  This, obviously, is a moving target, given the need to synchronize with release cycles.  However, we are currently in a good position to have the fruits from out latest re-engineering/re-design effort packaged up as well formed modular enhancements to GeoNode 2.4, with the hopes that many if not all of them would become available in GeoNode 2.5.  All of our code is available via GitHub under an open license.  For those unfamiliar with the GeoNode, it is a license free and open source geospatial content management system built by the integration of several other license free and open source components including PostGIS, GeoServer, OpenLayers 3, and Django.  Our new client libraries for sophisticated support of temporal, social and narrative features will be packaged up and released as augmentations to OpenLayers 3, much the way GeoExt was an augmentation to OpenLayers 2.  As such, I would like to think we have done everything one might do to ensure that the MapStory.org<http://MapStory.org> platform is license free.  As for Cesium, we are exploring the use of Cesium particularly due to their rigorous support of 4D (e.g., 3D plus time), and their proven integration with OpenLayers 3.  We have not made any moves yet, and will likely not make any until the end of 2016, due to resource constraints.  We will only be using license free Cesium releases, in keeping with our larger platform strategy and commitment to open source.

3)  We designated MapStory.org<http://MapStory.org> as an Open Educational Resource (OER) and we have put lots of time in to the data licensing regime that we use.  We began with a desire to synch with the Open Street Map community, around ODBL for data and cc-by-sa for the graphical representations of MapStories themselves.  The rise of Creative Commons 4.0 has re-opened this discussion.  And, frankly, disagreement within the Open Street Map community has made our (future) choice less clear.  Since MapStory has similarities to OSM, Wikipedia, and a variety of OER’s, we have to think critically about the right approach for the future.  And, we are open to ideas from the community.  But, we are actively engaged with Creative Commons, OSM community representatives, and then like.

4)  We fully intend to have MapStory.org<http://MapStory.org> be free to use for everyone on earth, forever.  Much the same way that Wikipedia is.  We like to say that we built MapStory.org<http://MapStory.org> as a starfish, not a spider.  It cannot be killed by the need to take cuts.  Thus far, we have not had to take cuts.  But, we have not yet matured to the point where a million users worldwide donate $10 every holiday season! - as Wikipedia enjoys. We see a bright future ahead that will secure free access to MapStory.org<http://MapStory.org> for the world.  But, everything costs money, and we will work with our community to pay the server bill, and to maintain the core staff necessary for it to work off in to the future.

Hopefully I have addressed your concerns.  If not, please take another shot and I am more than happy to respond!  Our re-engineering/re-design will be complete very soon, and at that point, we will make a full court press and reach out to the GeoForAll community to see how MapStory.org<http://MapStory.org> can support our collective aspirations.

Thanks!

Chris

Dr. Christopher K Tucker
Chairman of the Board of Trustees
The MapStory Foundation
@MapStory
tucker at mapstory.org<mailto:tucker at mapstory.org>
703-981-9373

On Feb 16, 2016, at 9:12 PM, Suchith Anand <Suchith.Anand at nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:Suchith.Anand at nottingham.ac.uk>> wrote:

Dear colleagues,

Geo4All is committed to work for open principles in geoeducation and protect open principles for our future generations. Empowerment of teachers is important to enable empowerment of students. Thanks to Dr. Nikos Lambrinos (Greece) and Elżbieta Wołoszyńska-Wiśniewska (Poland) who are our chairs for Teacher Training & School Education thematic who have been providing us some excellent inputs and ideas for helping us empower school teachers globally. One of the main points raised was that currently our focus is on higher education/universities and all our labs are in university level and school education(primary and secondary) has very different requirements and needs and hence it is important to create a seperate network theme for schools . This network's focus should be directly related to school education and involving partners from this sector. We are grateful to Ela and Nikos for thier leadership and inputs for us.

Now we have reached critical mass in university level , we need to focus on expanding this to school level and to do that we need to have seperate school network started as Nikos righly pointed out as the requirements/needs are very different. In fact, i believe that if we start a school level focussed network now (building upon the networks and infrastructure we have in place), it will become much much bigger than the university network and have wider impact.

We now also have access to different online platforms like GeoAcademy ( good for our teacher training needs but not currently for school level students) . Phil has kindly send us this info that GeoAcademy can provide a starting point for a 5 course sequence in Introduction to Geospatial Technology using QGIS to be adopted and/or adapted by any college, school, etc. The free curriculum can be downloaded here: http://spatialquerylab.com/projects/open-source-gis/ . The course can be enrolled in directly, for free, at anytime by anyone from anywhere here: http://fossgeo.org/free-qgis-courses/. Finally, an example of a Canadian Technical College adapting these can be found here http://www.gogeomatics.ca/magazine/open-source-gis-for-everyone-a-qgis-based-program-at-langara-college-vancouver.htm

For wider spatial literacy in school level , we will need an online platform that is free and open as well as easy to use. Hence it is important to explore collaborations with other like minded organisations, so last week we (Maria, Nikos and myself - few more were planning to join but couldn't make it) had a telemeeting with Chris Tucker of Mapstory Foundation to help us understand more about thier software and platform. Chris kindly explain details of the platform and its user friendliness (you don't need to be a GIS expert to use it which is a good advantage). We also discussed some good examples (for example mapping the neighbourhood) to help teach spatial literacy in schools globally. I think having MapStory examples of deforestation in different places might also be a good example to help teach students on effects of climate change as well as need for protecting the environment. Teaching Spatial literacy in schools  is key for also helping build good global citizens.

For Geo4All, we welcome collaboration with everyone who follows our principles. Our main requirement for the online education platform  is that all the software and tools used for our education will need to be free and open (not only now but for the future). The reason is that we have seen some examples in geo domain where tools that started as 'free' later changed conditions. For example, Google Earth even if not open source, they offered an open API attacting lot of users, which they also took away after a while. Now the open source ‘version’ of Cesium is again looks like planning to charge users for their 'premium' version , so we need to be careful and understand full details of any educational platform and tools that we think of using. So i am kindly request Chris and MapStory Foundation to provide confirmation that all the underlying software and tools (including the Virtual Globes) are all free and open source software so that we can be assured that the MapStory platform will be fully free and open for everyone in the long term.

I also request colleagues to go through http://mapstory.org/  platform and any queries/more information that you have, please ask Chris and he will be pleased to answer. I really hope we all can work together and scale up ideas for expanding our school education programs globally.

Best wishes,

Suchith

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