Ubuntu-tz Core Team member pages

[Max E.K]

Hi Guy,

Many Thanks for nice words of encouragement.

I am sure we could direct some team effort towards setting up Special
Interests Groups, in fact i think its  a very good idea as most of the
people out there use a particular OS for just specific function most of
the time related to their line of work.

In the coming days we will create the Special interests section and you
are more than welcome to run the GIS group, and you can also post your
experiences under the projects section of the site, but again we need to
complete those.

Anybody out there interested in running other groups so that we can set
them up simultaneously?

Once the section is up i will send you access details off the list. 

with kind regards,

Max.

--------------------------------------------
Max E. Kimambo 
Mbeya Medical Research Programme 
IT Department 
P.O Box 2410, Mbeya, Tanzania 
T/F:+255252500220 M: +255773769883 
--------------------------------------------
Quote of the moment: 
The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.
Confucius


On Mon, 2008-09-08 at 10:49 +0300, Guy Picton Phillipps wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>  
> 
> Firstly thanks for getting the TZ Ubuntu website up and running, I for
> one, as a pretty much complete novice in Ubuntu really welcome the
> development of a local focal point, and am looking forward to being an
> active member…Good Skills! I also think having core team member
> profiles is a good idea, not only to put a human face to Ubuntu in TZ
> but also to highlight the multitude of different interests that Ubuntu
> users will represent. 
> 
>  
> 
> My initial interest in Ubuntu was simply to experience a different
> operating system, however it quickly became apparent that I could use
> Ubuntu for some things that I couldn’t use other OS for. For example,
> some scientific applications are designed specifically for Linux
> systems, so relatively quickly I started using only certain aspects of
> Ubuntu, and am still fairly ignorant on large parts of the operating
> system. There is, imho, a lot of potential here to get Ubuntu adopted
> by the scientific community in Tanzania and East Africa/Africa as a
> whole, as the applications I started using Ubuntu for are related to
> climate change. In fact most of the tools to manipulate and extract
> data from climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on
> Climate Change (IPCC) are designed to run on Linux. This is of
> interest, as there is currently a real need for African researchers to
> start looking at the possible impacts of climate change on the
> continent and to do this they need the model outputs, which they can
> only really work with efficiently using a Linux system - and what
> better Linux system than Ubuntu  ;-). One current barrier to this  is
> that when a scientist needs access to such data, unless they are
> currently familiar with Linux, then the necessity of finding a spare
> machine or dual booting Ubuntu, then learning the operating system and
> possibly some scripting language like Python to automate certain
> processes means that the path of least resistance may lie elsewhere.
> Providing resources to make this process less painful and more
> efficient is one of the key benefits of having a site like ubuntu-tz,
> and of course and excellent way of promoting use of Ubuntu – not
> necessarily as a replacement desktop (initially), but a standalone
> tool that is used to run certain applications. Of course this may also
> be considered similar to the free sample given out by your friendly
> neighbourhood drug dealer to get you hooked! (And what is wrong with
> that I hear you ask?!!) In any case I would like to add an objective,
> or maybe just a focus for Ubuntu-TZ which is getting the system
> adopted by the scientific community here.
> 
>  
> 
> Another area I am interested in is using Geographic Information
> Systems (GIS) on Ubuntu. This is the area that I am mainly working in,
> and given the cost and learning barriers associated with most
> commercial GIS (there are some exceptions of course), I would be
> really happy if it is possible to identify a collection of open source
> GIS applications running on Ubuntu which could be available to users
> in Africa and beyond at no cost. Linked to the use of GIS is an
> interest in processing speed; given that users of GIS often need to
> process large amounts of data, speed can be a primary consideration.
> Given that the main commercial GIS software supplier hasn’t yet and
> doesn’t seem willing to produce a native 64bit version of their
> product for windows, there is a real potential for open source GIS
> software to exceed the performance of some commercial systems. Given
> the amount of moaning on GIS mailing lists about the sluggishness of
> currently available software this could represent a real opportunity
> to promote open source GIS software (and the operating systems they
> run on of course). Given that I am admittedly ill informed on what
> makes an OS fast I am currently in a poor position to evaluate this,
> but I hope that over the coming months I can make a start on this. One
> major challenge for open source GIS though is current functionality. I
> have looked briefly at a couple of applications and my initial
> impression is that they understandably have much less functionality
> than the commercial versions. It is very possible though that a
> collection of several different applications may be able to provide
> most of the functionality that you need, so it is also interesting to
> evaluate the different products available, what they can do and
> possibly start looking at gluing several together – this seems to
> already be starting with the inclusion of a GRASS toolbox (GRASS being
> a well established open source GIS) into Quantum GIS (a relative
> newcomer to the open source GIS arena). A more advanced project would
> be the development from scratch or modification of an existing
> application that would be optimised to run on Ubuntu. However I don’t
> know whether this would be feasible from a technical expertise
> perspective or even desirable in terms of the relative benefits that
> could be gained by optimising – though still worth thinking about.
> 
>  
> 
> I suppose the point of the random ramble above is to suggest that as
> well as having core team member profiles, there could also be a number
> of special interest groups (SIGs) for different aspects of Ubuntu
> usage – I would be more than willing to volunteer to kick off a TZ GIS
> on Ubuntu special interest group, which would build on the existing
> Ubuntu GIS resource https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuGIS but would also
> address in more detail some of the issues mentioned above, and
> hopefully focus on applications and challenges that are specific to
> TZ. I would also be interested in a Scientific SIG, but as the scope
> of this could be huge this probably needs more thrashing out to come
> up with a good set boundaries for what it would and wouldn’t aim to
> achieve.
> 
>  
> 
> Would be interested to hear about others thoughts on whether such SIGs
> would be useful and other areas of specialisation that SIGs could be
> relevant for, apart from anything, it is interesting to read about
> what others are doing……..and daydreaming about changing jobs when
> everything gets too much!
> 
>  
> 
> Looking forward to exploring this more,
> 
>  
> 
> Guy
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> 
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