CNG Education Working Group meeting 2025-06-25

A bi-weekly meeting of the CNG Education Working Group

Attendees

Your name / org / github handle

• Michelle Roby / Radiant Earth / @PowerChell
• Jarrett Keifer / Element 84 / @jkeifer
• Matt Fisher / Schmidt DSE / @mfisher87
• Youssef Harby / @Youssef-Harby

Action items

• Michelle: Create a “dumping ground” Google doc for concepts and tools
  • Michelle: Create 4 tabs and start brain-dumping: Concepts, tools, roles, other. Unstructured.
  • All: Start populating stuff!
  • Hopefully Michelle: Go through issues, redirect folks to the new doc.
• All: Think about / research what does it mean to make our docs “Ai-ready”?
• Matt: Set up infrastructure for meeting notes.

Notes

• Where we left off:
  • We think a high-level mapping of the ecosystem would be a valuable tool
  • Start by thinking of a persona who has no GIS or programming knowledge.
  • “Total newcomer” / “project manager”
    • The only difference is how deep they go; they both probably want overview-level information
• Structure of the materials:
  • Give people the words & links they need to learn more
  • “What does cloud-optimized mean?”
  • https://guide.cloudnativegeo.org/glossary.html
  • What kind of jobs and roles exist in this ecosystems? What unique challenges do they face?
• Next steps:
  • Explore concept mapping. What type of map would newcomers want?
    • Tyler’s obsidian map: https://github.com/tylere/obsidian-vault-cng
    • Youssef’s PDF map: https://cloudnativegeo.slack.com/files/U07AM35HJKS/F0913R58J6N/cng-infrastructure-concept.pdf
    • ThoughtWorks radar: https://www.thoughtworks.com/en-us/radar
    • Element84 radar: https://element84.com/geospatial-tech-radar-24/
    • Is a “radar” useful for newcomers?
      • More for established teams evaluating tools?
      • Important to map concepts/abstractions, not software tools. E.g. understanding the concept of “Chunking”
      • From zoomed-out to zoomed-in: Motivations/problems -> concepts/abstractions -> tools/solutions
    • What about timelines? Show problems we’ve faced at different eras of geospatial computing, how we’ve solved them, what new problems were revealed, and how we solved those, and so on.
• Things that we want to exist - which have the best ratio of usefulness:achievableness and/or uniqueness:achievableness?
  • Timeline view of technology & concepts
  • Map view of technology & concepts
  • Clear definition of “What is cloud native?”
  • What kind of jobs and roles exist?
• Resources
  • https://zarr.eopf.copernicus.eu/knowledge-and-tools/
    • Uses a “tagging” system to break the dataset down across multiple axes. The type of the information (general or technical), the user persona, the complexity level, theme, etc.
  • https://eopf-sample-service.github.io/eopf-sample-notebooks/gallery
• Ai-readiness of docs
  • What does this look like? We don’t know! We need to learn.
  • https://www.chakra-ui.com/blog/06-making-docs-ai-friendly
• We need a dumping ground for ideas. Where is the dumping ground? Google Docs, GitHub markdown docs, HackMD docs?
  • GoogleDocs. +: Comments are part of the comment. -: Access control
    • Viewable by default, liberally grant access.
  • GitHub. + History is easier to control, access less of a mess
  • Decision: Use google docs.