[Geo4All] Vision for an OSGeo education program

[Tom Roche]

Sergio Acosta y Lara[1]
> I have direct access to teachers who are prepared to take FOSS4G material into the classroom.

...

> I have full support from the institution where I work (Ministry of Transport and Public Works)

Excellent! Note that I am *not* trying to "dump on" Cameron Shorter here, but I strongly suspect we should not try to do this "top down," e.g.,

Cameron Shorter[2]
>> If you had access to scores of people to help build everything required to create a GIS training program, what would it look like?

Personally--and I say this as someone with exactly zero experience in this domain=developing and deploying FLOSS GIS tools for "formal education" or "classroom settings"--I suspect we will be more productive if we work "bottom up": find out what a (relatively small number of) educators want, deliver what we can in those cases, test the "user experience," and eventually assemble working pieces into something that scales into a more general "GIS training program." Specifically:

Firstly, we should try to develop a relatively short list (3-5?) of "target groups" with whom we could work, who could provide

1. access to students. What we most need are testbeds. This should be easily understood by folks on this list, since a/the big problem for many folks seeking to work on problems involving GIS specifically and scientific computing more generally is *platform access*: inability to use hardware and (FLOSS GIS) software necessary to address their task. In this case (FOSS4G education), platform=students--gotta have that.

2. committment. We should seek to work with groups that have demonstrated prior and ongoing interest ("track record" in US English) in this task.

3. funding. I'm guessing that we will not be able to self-fund as much as we want, so IMHO we should look for groups that already have funding toward this task, or who seem reasonably able to acquire it.

4. diversity. To the extent we can, with the resources we have, we should probably try to work with groups targeting various age (e.g., grade level), language/culture, and spatial groups, since we (IIUC) want ultimately to go global.

Note that we probably don't need to get a full list together before starting to work with any group; I'm emphasizing more that we don't want to "spread too thin." So I'd personally recommend starting toward identify candidate groups from among those who have already "bubbled up" on this thread:

* Randal Hale's school[3] (or other contacts)
* Sergio Acosta y Lara's Plan Ceibal[4] contacts
* the ISU primary-ed team[5]

Secondly, after we have identified at least one target group, we should meet (virtually or F2F) with them and try to intersect

* what they want to do
* what we want to do
* what we *can* do with available resources

We should be able to do that in parallel with identifying other target groups, but we will need to stop--or at least prioritize--before we stretch our implementation resources too far. Because implementation (for each target group, "scratching their itches") will be a very big Step 3.

Iff[6] we can do *that*, scale up to a general-purpose FOSS4G training program that can assault the Microsoft/ESRI monolith worldwide.

FWIW, Tom Roche <Tom_Roche at pobox.com>

[1]: https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/geoforall/2016-November/003271.html
[2]: https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/geoforall/2016-October/003265.html
[3]: https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/2016-October/016868.html
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceibal_project , https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Ceibal
[5]: https://education.illinoisstate.edu/nsf/curriculum/
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_and_only_if