Maybe what we are missing are the existing OSGeo-led education labs
inside highschools - I was cooking now and thought of the great work
being done by Bridget Fleming with the South African highschool
geography teachers. How can we publish and share this great work, and
spread that out to other highschools around the world - can OSGeo's
Geo4All committee make that its focus now?
Anyway, 'food' for thought! :)
Thank you again Sergio for bringing this to everyone's attention.
Night all,
-jeff
On 2016-10-27 6:04 PM, Jeff McKenna wrote:
Hi Sergio,
Thank you for sharing this news.
I'd like to take this opportunity to take a moment for us, our
foundation, to look in the mirror. Like this article points out
strongly (yet indirectly), we still have much work to do to reach the
youth of today and tomorrow. And I don't mean the United States or any
one country, as I see this in my own backyard in Canada and everywhere I
travel for OSGeo: a focus on universities and industry (where the money
and funding is), and a pure lack of focus on those fresh energetic and
unbiased minds of youth in highschool and middleschool. I see it each
year in the Geo4All day (or PostGIS day, or GISDay, whatever we all call
it) where events are held for university students and industry
professionals, all over the world - the problem is those attendees of
the events already know the thrill of the Open community, of geospatial,
of our passion. We miss the focus on today's youth.
I always tried to speak to the back row of the theatre, to sing to those
at the very back too shy to come forward yet so eager to be part of the
spotlight, part of the community, and I put much focus on those rarely
heard of communities and countries around the world, giving them the
spotlight and the microphone to shine and grow and be seen and heard on
the world stage - well, the time is now for us to give that spotlight to
the youth as well.
Now that Geo4All is the official education committee for the OSGeo
foundation, we can use that committee to tackle this huge hole, or
rather this huge opportunity. Maybe the Geo4All committee feels that
they are indeed handling this already, in the highschools etc, and this
message can help Geo4All promote and recruit more champions for their
existing work. Great! I'd like to hear of our equivalent for this
ConnectED initiative by Esri, focusing on the youth (and not directly on
universities), of how youth learn what "OSGeo" is, what "OSGeo" means -
as this article strongly points out, youth learn what "Esri" means,
indeed Esri continues to do great work and focus on that huge future
market of youth. But what are we doing as the OSGeo foundation? Talking
here about that can help build this momentum.
Just how many highschools and middle schools are involved in our Geo4All
initiative by OSGeo's education committee? Can someone come up with a
total from the list of current labs?
https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Edu_current_initiatives What does that
total tell us? How can we improve on that total?
I actually was on the stage and handed an award to about 4 highschool
students in person at the FOSS4G-Europe event in Como last year, on
behalf of OSGeo; I saw their passion and spoke with them right after the
session, they were thrilled to be included in this community.
This was an award led by the Geo4All committee, so, this is an example
of their great work with the youth of today - but I bet few knew of that
award, well we can hopefully change that here through Sergio's wakeup
message.
I hope this message brings all those passionate leaders out there in
OSGeo's Geo4All committee here, with their great examples of their work,
and we can use this news shared by Sergio to help change this myth that
OSGeo isn't a part of the youth activities today, get more press on the
great work by the Geo4All committee of OSGeo (as mentioned by Cameron),
and gather more champions to keep spreading our passion to the youth of
tomorrow - as I've said many times, we're currently hiring champions :)
-jeff
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