Feedback on Questions for POSSE 2011

1. How does "The Open Source Way" apply to your courses?
2. How will you incorporate what you've learned her into you coursework?
3. Any Feedback/Comments on POSSE itself you'd like to add?

1. We see open source as offering alternatives to any commercial tools that exist. It is important to have alternatives because of the unpredictable nature of companies and their technical directions. They have investors as their primary responsibility and their release cycle can be unpredictable. It is also a great teaching tool for students to see the implementation of algorithms/workflows and how they might be integrated into a larger open source system. Lastly, open source software allows students as "glue" components to prototype a workflow for their research. The students become even more valuable when they graduate because they know a "suite" of tools rather than a single package.
2. The communication tools and the software management tools will be integrated into the research process. Documenting the false starts, successful but inefficient implementations, and future "to-do" lists will help subsequent students see the problem solving process and put them on the fast track to productivity.
3. Feedback and comments:

• The session on the history of the various open source projects was a very informative one and would like to see more open source tools be presented in this manner.
• A comprehensive description of the various licensing options in open source and examples of projects that use the different licensing.
• Give "homework" prior to meeting by having the participants get into the communication tools the "IRC" and "Wiki" before hand so that any questions can be fielded on the opening session. A little screencast on the two tools on the mechanics would be good to post so that people can jump into them and get comfortable with it.

Rolando Raqueño, Ph.D.

Research Scientist

Digital Imaging and Remote Sensing Laboratory

Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science

Rochester Institute of Technology

Well... It's about time! ... I blogged.

OK, so I've always been a proponent of Open Source simple because it allows me to do my work (and our students) a quickly as possible. It's not that we don't use proprietary software or other commercial tools, it's just that open source tools have always been a key component in many of our workflows in remote sensing research. The interdisciplinary nature of our work draws on a many domains where a critical step considered "trivial" and "obvious" to the practitioners of one field is a novel technique in another.

Teaching often implies a professor->student interaction. But there is an autodidactic process (just to get pedantries out of the way) that is often glossed over. I hope that "muddling" through the tools will be candidly expressed in this blog as well as point to the context in which these components were used.