Recently, in the U.S., I attended the Gov 2.0 summit in Washington D.C. put on by Tim O'Reilly and others (www.gov2summit.com) which had a number of discussions/presentations with some of the major U.S. Federal CIO people, among others. (I'm planning on writing an OSGeo edu blog entry on some of the things I saw there...). But what was an overarching theme that was resonating throughout that conference was "openness as innovation." An example used multiple times was the innovation that has emerged (private sector) as a consequence of the GPS system as a "platform" for innovating at the endpoints. The importance of geocoding and geospatial was another theme, as was openness of data. People on this list, of course, know this, and many countries are farther ahead in this than the U.S.
The reason I raise this is because OSGeo and the federation of projects it represents is a global leader in this area and I see the next 5 years as a critical era for the organization.
To me, education around open technologies is key toward this future growth. Over the last 2-years, I've been learning a little about the challenges of leading a community of volunteers interested in OSGeo education. I don't know how successful I've been -- lots of demands on my time like everyone else -- but I've tried. We do have a searchable database of educational content that I think many of us should be proud of as an example of what we can do as a community.
But one of the things I think we need to do better as a community is somehow working with the various software projects on education initiatives. Education efforts will promote the software developed by OSGeo affiliated projects. In addition, we've started recently a conversation about trying to define an educational curriculum around OS Geospatial. In my view, we need to be trying to identify "core competencies" for OSGeo developers as well as users of the various software packages and move, as a community toward developing some system of developing these materials together, and sharing and deriving new material based on other material.
Empirical work I have not yet published in my forthcoming book on Open Source collaboration with statistical analysis of 107,000 Sourceforge projects is showing me that projects that are "successful" -- meaning they continue to worked on and are not abandoned -- are very often made up of small teams of developers. But what we have found to be statistically significant is the successful projects have at least 1 more developer compared to abandoned projects. This tells me that you don't need large teams to be productive. But you do need to be able to "link" or "connect" two or three people globally who have a passion for a project or an idea and also have some of the skills to tackle that problem. OSGeo has the "platform" and the global reach to make such connections in my view, whether it be in developing software, or developing educational material.
My goal, whether it be on the board or in my role trying to move the education group forward, is to see if we can harness this productive energy.
Cheers Charlie Schweik
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