[Showme-devel] Catch up: Background research

[Kristoffer Rose]

Dear Bernelle and everyone,

Thanks for the thoughtful comments. The "diffuse competition" came out of
the initial proposal for finding a use of an ARM box (Graham and me at
DebConf), leading to the ShowMeBox proposal. It is certainly not final.

I am glad to go with any proposal you can enthuse local educators about -
that is in some sense the most critical aspect of the entire exercise. Also
do not hesitate to think about having two categories (like "pre-college"
and "college"), and whether we can involve other countries (like Kenya
where, for example, the AkiraChix are probably game).

On my TS side, there is enthusiasm but we are basically waiting on a
resolution of the beaker port, as that affects how the proposal is
presented internally.

In the meantime it will really help if you can get a feel for where your
local teachers may need instruction in data science and whether you have
locals or we can help from over here (by sending someone), as that needs to
be included in the proposal. We also have access to support organizations
dedicated to education here but I have not investigated that yet.

Having the competition later gives us more time, which is good.

'nuff rambling from me: I have not been very active (that is a story for
another time) but have not dropped this.

Best,
   Kris

P.S. Yes, having GIS information in-system is good.





On Thu, Oct 15, 2015 at 4:53 PM, Bernelle Verster <bernelle at indiebio.co.za>
wrote:

> Hi all
>
> I added some links that may provide open data for analysis on the website.
>
> I also spoke to a few people who are teachers, their feedback:
> * Don't try to target many schools, start small and grow from there
> * Having a diffuse competition many months ahead of DebConf is not a
> good idea. Try for one day only. Thinking about this makes me feel
> more and more strongly that we should stay with the rough 24h format
> of the past Beaker competition, rather than a many month thing.
> * From Gavin (friend and at [2]):  I do recommend that you consider
> installing QGIS and other tools from DebianGIS [1] on it as standard.
>
> I am gearing up to contact people who may be able to help design the
> competition appropriately for high school students - how
> simple/complicated it should be, how not to be too 'lets save africa'
> but add actual real value, etc. I have some leads but at the moment
> this is still fuzzy.
>
> Then, I was wondering if we should advertise this project to
> Developers to grow the team - do you feel you need more personpower?
> Similarly, do we need other sponsors - if e.g. we want to bus the
> students in to the conference or similar?
>
> [1] - https://wiki.debian.org/DebianGis
> [2] - http://kartoza.com/
>
> --
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> Showme-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org
> https://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/showme-devel
>
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