[Live-demo] Re: OSGeo Live DVD - ELOGeo

[Cameron Shorter]

On 05/08/11 01:46, Suchith Anand wrote:
>
> Hi Cameron,
>
> As you know, the e-learning platform for the Open Geospatial community 
> (ELOGeo) is now ready. It will be really good if the quick start 
> guides, tutorials etc in  OSGeo LiveDVD are put in the repository. We 
> can create separate section for LiveDVD articles in the repository. We 
> greatly welcome your suggestions and inputs for this.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Suchith
>

Suchith,
CCing osgeo-live and education lists, with your permission.

I agree that it would be valuable to align OSGeo-Live and ELOGeo 
efforts. What I think is important is that we define what we would like 
our documentation repository to look like in 3 to 5 years time, beyond 
the initial project kickoff, and then focus on putting processes in 
place for maintaining the documentation repository in order to get to 
our goals.

You see, documentation becomes dated, and needs to be maintained if it 
is to remain current. Documentation is developed to different target 
audiences, is written to different depths of completeness, and to 
varying levels of quality.
The challenges that ELOGeo can help solve is:

1. Make it easier to publish and find related documentation about open 
source geospatial topics.

2. Help keep existing documentation up to date, by matching maintainers 
with source authors, and providing processes and tools for updating 
documents.

3. Remove, hide, or make less important, dated documentation, so that it 
is easier to find the relevant documents.

4. Increase consistency, quality and inter-relatedness of documentation. 
In particular, ensure that created documents connect with each other. 
Ie, all document authors shouldn't need to write a history of GIS. That 
could be handled once, then everyone else can reference the one document.

 From what I've seen so far, it seems that ELOGeo is currently only 
tackling item 1: building a register of documents, something like 
http://freshmeat.net. This is valuable in that it helps build an audit 
of what is available, but there is still a lot more work required before 
it will be very valuable. And by very valuable, I mean that I'd like to 
see the majority of lecturers and educators around the world use the 
ELOGeo repository as a primary source of teaching material, and to 
maintain existing material as part of their day to day work, because 
doing so is easier than not!

I'm convinced that this goal is possible, because in a small way, we 
have done something similar for OSGeo-Live. But what I believe is 
required is:

1. A vision of what a full set of course material will look like, along 
with a definition of end users and links back to training goals (like 
the Body of Knowledge and University training courses).

2. Writing templates and guidelines, and supporting tools.

3. Associated processes and workflows for document creation.

4. A dedicated editor/technical writer charged with providing the 
technical review.

5. A project coordinator / champion who will help attract authors, and 
help authors write funding proposals for their external organizations.

-----------------------

That said, I think you were just asking about the short term goal of how 
to get OSGeo-Live listed in the existing ELOGeo repository.
My suggestion is that it just becomes part of the OSGeo-Live release 
process. We should keep such registration simple, so that it continues 
to be maintained in future.
So I suggest just one entry for all of OSGeo-Live, rather than writing 
an entry for all 50 odd projects.
I also feel that it is important for the point of truth for latest 
material should point back to the source, in this case, 
http://live.osgeo.org.
I'll have more time to look at the details after the upcoming release of 
OSGeo-Live. (Feel free to remind me if I forget).

-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Director
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

Think Globally, Fix Locally
Geospatial Solutions enhanced with Open Standards and Open Source
http://www.lisasoft.com

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