CNG Education Working Group meeting 2025-06-11

A bi-weekly meeting of the CNG Education Working Group

Author

The CNG Education Working Group

Published

June 11, 2025

Attendees

  • Andrew Smith
  • Youssef Harby
  • Michelle Roby
  • Matt Fisher (@mfisher87)
  • Jarrett Keifer
  • Tyler Erickson

Action items

Notes

  • See GitHub: https://github.com/cng-education
    • Issues: https://github.com/cng-education/curriculum/issues
  • User types (https://github.com/cng-education/curriculum/issues/11):
    • Create a “why” so they want to go down the different paths
    • Software background, no GIS experience
    • Geography backgrounds, no programming experience – ArcGIS user
      • People who use ArcGIS but hate it? 😆
        • Mad about “Error 9999” AGAIN?
        • Bugs that haven’t been fixed for half a decade or more?
        • Want more automation?
        • Youssef: Engage ArcGIS users where there are, e.g. design notebooks for running in ArcPro.
    • Project manager: Needs to engage in strategy discussions with developers and possibly geographers, researchers. Need conceptual understanding. Why is cloud native important strategically? Why should they say “yes” to their team?
      • Want to understand at the conceptual level
    • Farmer who wants to do some analysis on their field: where are the boulders? Where are my irrigation lines? Where are the floodgates? Not a programmer.
  • Map of the landscape as the entrypoint to all of this
    • Think “ThoughtWorks tech radar”-ish?
  • https://www.earthdatascience.org/courses/ (example)
  • Existing resources (https://github.com/cng-education/curriculum/issues/2)
  • On targeting ESRI / ArcGIS users?
    • Need a license to build and test any tutorials we make
    • ESRI is a huge company, they should assign their employees to work on that type of material
    • Other ethical concerns with advancing the ESRI machine over open source alternatives
    • ArcGIS Notebooks are just Jupyter Notebooks, rebranded; some ESRI users don’t know what Jupyter is!
  • Mapping CNG tools
    • https://cloudnativegeo.slack.com/files/U07AM35HJKS/F0913R58J6N/cng-infrastructure-concept.pdf