Hello,
I don't know if this is the right place to discuss this but I just start.
At my university open source is little used in eductaion and research.
There are only a few single warriors who care about it.
We have serveral departments that use GIS programs. Each of them buys
normally the licences for Arc*
Most students make their way into one program after attening a number of
classes on how to push the buttons of that program. But when they come
back to it after a while all this is lost since they haven't learned the
logic behind. To my thinking, getting into the many FOSS programs forces
students to lokk behind and learn concepts rather than functions.
Another thing is the question of resources. Instead of buying licences
from big companies that money could be saveed to by data loggers,
equipment or pay a FOSS-developer.
Most projects buy expensive tools when they only want to produce some
maps to display the survey fields etc.
So, my question is:
* Is there a possibilty set up a university wide infrastructure on FOSS
that enables whoever neeeds it to handle geodata and analyse it even
when they are not educated GIS specialists (rather geo/agric scientists)?
* Naive idea/vision:
1) computing center of the university employs a GIS specialist(s) who
act as service force for other disciplines (set up of geodatabases,
introductory courses)
2) computing center sets up a server with GRASS, postgis, etc.
3) those who need geo processing will install a tailored cywin or eny
other environment to access the latest version of the FOSS GIS software
on the server via -X forwarding or simply access their data in the
postgressdb from various clients.
4) data in the postgressdb could be shared according to given access
rights
=> there infrastruture is just there, those who need take to whatever
level they'd need it.
* Question: would it be possible to implement such a scenario?
* Are there already such cases out there?
* Why not take the nice example of the various projects that deliver
FOSS for schools (Edubuntu, Skolelinux, etc.) and adapt this to the
world of FOSS4G?
* Who or what are the thoughts of OSGEO on this?
Keen to hear your opinion, thoughts, experineces, critics, etc.
Tim
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