[Qgis-psc] Discussion our financial situation

[Kurt Menke]

Hello everyone,

>> * certification is starting to get momentum; the plan was to have a
>> self-sustaining structure, so I believe a part of the surplus should be
>> devoted to the development, setup, and management of the infrastructure
>> (thanks Tim!)

>Yes, it's progressing nicely. I wonder, if in the future, such income
>should be dedicated into improving the training material and education
>situation? Would make sense to me. As many people pointed out, training
>and education, and getting into University curricula seems to be one of
>the key factors why ESRI is so successful. It would make sense to
>dedicate funds towards this aspect. Not that I have clear ideas what
>this means, but maybe others have?

I love the idea of investing income from the certification program into
development of some sort of university curriculum, and I would love to work
on it. As I wrote in my blog recently
<https://www.birdseyeviewgis.com/blog/2019/10/29/esri-and-me-part-3-education>,
I think getting more programs teaching with QGIS is key to broader FOSS
adoption. I've done quite a bit of this type of work, first with a
university level course I developed in 2008 and have been updating ever
since. Then with the GeoAcademy <https://foss4geo.wordpress.com/>, and most
recently with Discover QGIS 3.x - which I wrote hoping professors could use
it all or in part to begin teaching with QGIS.

I would love to contribute to this. Obviously there is already a lot of
great material out there - like the QGIS tutorial. So this could be a
conglomeration of existing materials including things like pyQGIS
tutorials. How it might differ from the current tutorial is that it would
incorporate more GIS concepts like data models, discussions of file
formats, cartographic theory, database theory, projections, common analysis
workflows etc.

It might just be a matter of updating, repackaging and getting the word
out. Not to trivialize all of that, but to say a lot of the building blocks
are already in place.
Kurt
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