[Ica-osgeo-labs] Fwd: [OSGeo-Discuss] Picking a name for "OSGeo Research and Education Labs Network"

Mon Jun 24 06:34:34 PDT 2013

Jeff, Landon,

I think it would be useful if the board and somebody from OSGeo Labs could comment on the confusing situation we have with
the OSGeo labs name - please read the thread of emails below and let us know what the board and OSGeo labs community
position is on this.

The fact is that the academic community likes "laboratories" because they are easy to establish
at universities, we just need a better way to distinguish them from the original OSGeo labs.

OSGeo REL works for us here at NCSU and it is used by the Prague lab and Politechnico di Milano is leaning towards 
it as well, but others (and there are many already) are using some variation of OSGeo labs or ICA-OSGeo lab
(many skipping the ICA part for various reasons).
So I am not sure how OSgeo REL will work for others (it is long if you try to spell it all out
but it looks different enough and when you google it you get our lab and Prague lab right on top)
Other ideas are welcome and we need to spend more time vetting and thinking about the pros and cons of each name
because once you select it and it spreads you are stuck with it.

So please Jeff and Landon let us know what the board and OSGeo labs community position is 

thank you,

Helena

Helena Mitasova
Associate Professor
Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences
2800 Faucette Drive, Rm. 1125 Jordan Hall
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC 27695-8208
hmitaso at ncsu.edu

"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.” 

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Suchith Anand <Suchith.Anand at nottingham.ac.uk>
> Date: June 24, 2013 7:07:28 AM EDT
> To: Maria Brovelli <maria.brovelli at polimi.it>, Helena Mitasova <hmitaso at ncsu.edu>, "ica-osgeo-labs at lists.osgeo.org" <ica-osgeo-labs at lists.osgeo.org>
> Cc: Markus Neteler <neteler at osgeo.org>, Suchith Anand <Suchith.Anand at nottingham.ac.uk>, Maria Brovelli <maria.brovelli at diiar-topo.polimi.it>
> Subject: RE: [OSGeo-Discuss] Picking a name for "OSGeo Research and Education Labs Network"
> 
> Dear Maria, Markus, Helena,
> 
> Thanks for the email and it is important that we build a strong brand and name for our expanding network. I am open to changing the name of our lab network if majority members wish. I am ccing all our colleagues in the ICA-OSGeo mail list as this is of interest to all of us.
> 
> As you rightly pointed out, there was confusion with OSGeo Labs name in the beginning (we cannot use OSGeo labs name for our network as the project incubation is the group that started first using OSGeo Labs name first and we have to respect that) so we had to find another suitable name for our network and as per the discussions in March time among our lab members based on majority consensus we decided on "ICA-OSGeo Labs Network" title and give individual nodes the flexibility to select the name for their lab that they want under a joint lab network umbrella.
> 
> It is only 3 months since we started actively using this name and in the meanwhile Manuel and his team were working on our website  at http://conlibre.org/osgeolabs/   The main thing now is to request Manuel is to redirect the website to point to www.osgl.osgeo.org  so that we can make sure this confusion with OSGeoLabs incubation site do not arise in the future (Manuel - you need to also change the tweet account for our lab network that you have created.)
> 
> I think it is very important to have the website fully ready asap (Manuel - if you can update the lab maps with the leaflet version and give all of us account access to add relevant content etc) and redirect to www.osgl.osgeo.org  to make sure there is clear information available to everyone. I am very grateful to Manuel and his colleagues for their work so far on our website and i request them to speed up the remaining work on the website.
> 
> I welcome all of your thoughts/ideas/suggestions on the best way forward on this and keep building our actively expanding network.
> 
> Suchith
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Maria Brovelli [mailto:maria.brovelli at polimi.it] 
> Sent: 23 June 2013 13:38
> To: Helena Mitasova
> Cc: Markus Neteler; Suchith Anand; Maria Brovelli
> Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Picking a name for "OSGeo Research and Education Labs Network"
> 
> Dear All
> I agree with Helena and Markus that is better to avoid confusion and I like very much the OSGeo REL name. In my opinion up to now the network is enough small to allow us to change the name with not too much mess. 
> That's my 2 cents....
> 
> Cheer.
> Maria
> 
> La Prorettrice Delegata
> del Polo Territoriale di Como
> Prof.ssa Maria Antonia Brovelli
> 
> Politecnico di Milano
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> Tel. +39-031-3327336
> Fax. +39-031-3327321
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> On Jun 21, 2013, at 4:10 PM, Helena Mitasova <hmitaso at ncsu.edu> wrote:
> 
>> Markus,
>> 
>> I have pointed out to this several times and we are well aware of the issue - it popped up right away when our colleagues in Mexico set up the web site and populated it with info about the other osgeo labs. 
>> I tried to suggest OSGeo REL (research and education laboratories) but I was over-voted on the discussion list as people were much more supportive of the shorter OSgeo labs (probably not being sufficiently aware of the existence of OSGeo labs, you know how thiese things work on the discussion lists). 
>> Suchith has originally talked about centers but to use the name center at US universities you need to have $1mil + funding and we are not there yet (that is why our OSGeo REL is within out Center for Earth Observation).
>> But I think that there is just too much confusion at this point and we need to do something about it - we have two options:
>> 
>> 1. Keep OSGeo labs for our network and ask the other OSGeo labs to 
>> change their name (which would be somewhat unfair becuase they had 
>> established the name first and it looks like they are becoming active) 
>> 2. Re-open the discussion on the ica-osgeo labs list before it is too late to change anything (note that this may mean changing the name of the mainling list, web site etc. but they are not spread too much yet so there is still time).
>> 
>> Markus - thank you for pointing this out - I think it is  a serious 
>> issue that needs to be addressed,
>> 
>> Helena
>> 
>> Helena Mitasova
>> Associate Professor
>> Department of Marine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences
>> 2800 Faucette Drive, Rm. 1125 Jordan Hall North Carolina State 
>> University Raleigh, NC 27695-8208 hmitaso at ncsu.edu
>> 
>> "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.” 
>> 
>> On Jun 21, 2013, at 9:45 AM, Markus Neteler wrote:
>> 
>>> Helena, Maria, Suchith,
>>> (of course this may go to more people, I just spoke with Maria about 
>>> it the other day and Helena I know for years)
>>> 
>>> I'm just coming back from the exciting FOSS4G-CEE conference in Bucharest.
>>> I wanted to report to you on ongoing confusion between the names for the Edu initiative and the Labs.
>>> 
>>> As a test I randomly inserted "OSGeo labs" in a search engine:
>>> 
>>> https://www.google.it/search?q=osgeo+labs&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=
>>> org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
>>> 
>>> and the first two hits are:
>>> OSGeo Labs - OSGeo Wiki
>>> 
>>> wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Labs
>>> May 27, 2013 – OSGeo Labs is an umbrella for open source geospatial software projects that would like to become OSGeo projects in the future, but that aren't ...
>>> Purpose - OSGeo Labs Project Selection ... - Becoming a Labs Project 
>>> Edu current initiatives - OSGeo Wiki
>>> 
>>> wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Edu_current_initiatives
>>> Jump to Interested in adding your own node into the ICA-OSGeo Labs network? – ? As the lab network is expanding fast ,we have also setup nodal ...
>>> 
>>> 
>>> To me, "ICA-OSGeo Labs" and "OSGeo Labs" sounds pretty much the same. I got the impression that quite a few FOSS4G-CEE participants had the same confusion.
>>> 
>>> Just to point it out to potentially rethink the name once more to make things more clear.
>>> 
>>> Best regards,
>>> Markus
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Thu, Mar 28, 2013 at 5:16 PM, Suchith Anand <Suchith.Anand at nottingham.ac.uk> wrote:
>>>> Hi All,
>>>> 
>>>> After discussing with our lab members, i am pleased to inform that we now have an official name and also short acronym (to be used for mailing list, domain name etc) which is easy to remember for the network.
>>>> 
>>>> "ICA-OSGeo Lab Network" is the official title of the network and OSGL for "Open Source Geospatial Labs" as the acronym for the url, subdomain name etc.
>>>> 
>>>> The Official full title brings and highlights two communities , the 
>>>> ICA (International Cartographic Association) and OSGeo together in 
>>>> our common aim to  support the establishment of Open Source 
>>>> Geospatial Laboratories and Research Centers across the world for 
>>>> supporting development of open-source geospatial software 
>>>> technologies, training and expertise. We started establishing the 
>>>> network of labs globally with the ICA-OSGeo MoU initiative  
>>>> http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/MOU_ICA
>>>> 
>>>> Individual labs (those already established and those in future) are free to select the names they wish. For example, Lab in UNMC is called Open-source Geospatial Research Lab, at NCSU it is OSGeo Research and Education Laboratory (OSGeoREL), it is Open Source Geospatial Lab in Newcastle University etc. That will also give individual nodes the flexibility to select the name for thier lab that they want under a joint lab network umberalla.
>>>> 
>>>> For subdomain - osgl.osgeo.org
>>>> 
>>>> For mailing list  osgl at lists.osgeo.org
>>>> 
>>>> We would like to thank the whole OSGeo community for helping spreading the message of our education initiative. The pace of growth has been much beyond our dreams and with more applications for establishing research labs from universities across the world, we are in target to establish over 100 research labs in the next three years globally. This is the biggest growth area in Geospatial  Science discipline and will have direct benefit of thousands of students across the world. Each of these research labs will keep expanding over the years with more staff and students.
>>>> 
>>>> Best wishes,
>>>> 
>>>> Suchith
>>>> 
>>> 
>> 