The workshop is a first workshop in the topic and will focus on educational use of the OSGeo Live, which is a self-contained bootable DVD, USB thumb drive or a Virtual Machine based on Xubuntu containing a wide variety of free and open source geospatial software. The OSGeo Live system is ready-to-use and it can be extended with the Debian-based Ubuntu package system. Details at http://live.osgeo.org/en/index.html   

The workshop aims to review the current state of how OSGeo and other free geospatial software and datasets are used in Universities, mainly in educational contexts, and discuss how the software could be better made advantage of especially by using the OSGeo Live. A further goal of the workshop is to initiate a network of people skilled in the technology behind the OSGeo Live system and coordinate resources of OSGeo education and curriculum community for this purpose.

 This full day workshop will be held in conjunction with the 4th Open Source GIS Conference in Nottingham, UK, on September 4, 2012. Details at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/osgis/home.aspx  

 Workshop topics:

• OSGeo and other free geospatial software in Universities
• Educational materials that use free geospatial software
• Packaging software and other digital materials for Ubuntu
• Experiences in delivering education using free geospatial software
• Experiences in packaging educational materials for geospatial
• Experiences in using OSGeo Live in Universities
• Experiences in using OSGeo Edu and other initiatives (OLPC, RPi etc) in Schools 

The workshop consists of invited talks and presentations selected from this call as well as of panel discussions, breakout sessions and other methods of collaboration.

Please submit a short abstract of your presentation (max 300 words) before July 31, 2012. The presentations will be selected by the organizing committee. Presentations will in general be 30 minutes. You will receive notification of acceptance by August 10, 2012. All presentations will be published on the web and included in the OSGIS 2012 proceedings USB.

Please send the abstract of your presentation to ari.jolma@aalto.fi   before July 31, 2012.

Organizers:

Ari Jolma (Aalto University, Finland)

Suchith Anand  (University of Nottingham, UK)

 Jeremy Morley  (University of Nottingham, UK)

 Charles M. Schweik (University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA)