[Ica-osgeo-labs] Ideas/Inputs for expanding "Geo for All" to School education and more collaborations with Industry, Government etc

[Suchith Anand]

Exactly and i really hope everyone will discuss ideas and come to a consensus on this at Como meetings. Anyone who supports our principles should be welcome.

It is true that we had only Universities as our main aim for establishing Open Source Geo Labs in the beginning (in fact, the aim was 5 labs in 5 years!) but we rapidly expanded much faster than we could imagine thanks to all amazing colleagues. Any successful initiative has to learn and evolve as we grow and that is exactly what we have been doing.
  
Even the focus now for establishing labs in Schools happened thanks to AAG related discussions and realising that we need to take action to support the empowerment of school teachers worldwide. So that is why we have to think of ideas and action plans for expanding to Schools.

From inputs received so far, there is widespread support for being inclusive to include Industry/Government/NGOs etc who follow our principles. Some colleagues did mention that though they definitely welcome Government /Industry etc to be part of the initiative, the title of ICA-OSGeo-ISPRS labs should only be for Education (i.e. only Universities, HE, FE, Schools etc be able to use the logos of ICA, OSGeo and ISPRS in their lab website etc). I think that is fine and having a separate category for supporters/partners  which will include Government/Industry etc will help solve this. That way we are inclusive and keep building more synergies for expanding. We now have regional chairs in place for helping us with this and enable the process of becoming a partner/supporter.

Thanks Kurt for your contributions and i am sure we will find a good solution acceptable for all soon.

Suchith

________________________________________
From: ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [ica-osgeo-labs-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Phillip Davis [pdavis at delmar.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, July 08, 2015 9:56 PM
To: Kurt Menke
Cc: ica-osgeo-labs at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [Ica-osgeo-labs] Ideas/Inputs for expanding "Geo for All" to School        education and more collaborations with Industry, Government etc

What's the argument? Thought we were Geo for ALL? :)

On Jul 8, 2015 4:53 PM, Kurt Menke <kurt at birdseyeviewgis.com> wrote:
As one of the eight Government/Industry/NGO Partner labs this is an interesting topic. As they say, “I wear a lot of hats”, which often means I don’t fall neatly into categories. [1] I am a GIS consultant, [2] author of an open source public health mapping blog (http://communityhealthmaps.nlm.nih.gov/ ), [3] a co-author of Mastering QGIS,  [4] a co-developer of the FOSS4G Academy, and [5] a part-time instructor at several universities and colleges. Wearing the latter hat [5], I’ve been teaching semester long FOSS4G courses for 7 years, and have developed 4 semester long open source GIS courses. All of this material is available and I’ve shared it with numerous teachers.  Aside from Del Mar College, none of the schools I teach at have any other FOSS4G instructors besides myself. In fact I’ve led the FOSS4G charge with these schools, and have gotten the point where these are required courses.

So on one hand I am an educator, I have numerous associations with institutions of higher education, and teach about 10 FOSS4G courses per year. On the other hand I’m industry, I’m  a GIS consultant working with dozens of clients. Some of that ends up being professional training.

I’m a hybrid ☺ So I’m not sure where someone like myself should be categorized. I suppose that largely depends on the desired form of the network of labs.
Cheers,
Kurt

**************************
Kurt Menke, GISP
Bird’s Eye View
www.BirdsEyeViewGIS.com<http://www.birdseyeviewgis.com/>
Work: 505-265-0243
Cell: 505-362-1776


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