On the links between FOSS developers and the academia

Hello,

I'm interested in the links between the GIS industry and academia. By 
"GIS industry" I mean also FOSS GIS, of which a growing part is outside 
academia. How could we strengthen the link between the academia and the 
developers of the free GI software? My background is not in computer 
science nor in geography/surveying but I've been writing some GI 
software related for my research (I'm not actually sure which way the 
causal link is). Now I guess I should be focusing more in GI software 
development in my research as also in teaching. In general I feel that I 
don't know well enough what would be relevant research, which would 1) 
benefit free GIS and 2) get funded. I attended OSG'05, and that was very 
helpful in this respect. For example I would be interested in usability 
/ interface related topics.

ESRI used to be quite good in getting the top researchers contribute (or 
sell, I guess) their results to ArcGIS (at least methods, I don't know 
about interface or other things), but I've heard rumours that they are 
not happy with the current situation. So maybe we can expect more 
university labs become ESRI development labs? (I see some worrying signs 
in my university). GRASS probably gets much input from academia but a 
lot more could be done.

I'm thinking about (in fact, I've been asked to) organising a workshop 
at the iEMSs 2006 conference, and this is the topic I have in mind. The 
workshop would focus on links between environmental modellers and 
geoinformaticians, as the topic of the conference is environmental 
modelling, but the links should be discussed also from the point of view 
of environmental management practitioners and freegis developers.

Ari

-- 
Prof. Ari Jolma
Kartografia ja Geoinformatiikka / Cartography and Geoinformatics
Teknillinen Korkeakoulu / Helsinki University of Technology
POBox 1200, 02015 TKK, Finland
Email: ari.jolma at tkk.fi URL: http://www.tkk.fi/~jolma