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| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
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| Subject: | [gislist] Invitation for Expession of Interest to participate in an
East African SDI Mashup |
| Date: |
03/16/2007 11:45:00 PM |
| From: |
Mick Wilson |
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Greetings, ppgis and sdi colleagues, and with
apologies for cross-list spamming.
The following is wordier than it ought to be but,
please, hack along with me to the end.
I am looking for motivated and capable individuals and
institutions to participate in a real-world
demonstrator of openSDI and ppGIS capabilities
focussed on East Africa.
Lots is written about the philosophy and benefits of
opens source/ open standards efforts to get important
geographically-related data flowing for the benefit of
society as a whole and the institutions within
society. So far, however, the the vast majority of
real examples we have to learn from are government
mandated or funded. And most (all?) of these are based
in OECD areas where institutional problems may remain
but the technology issues are being resolved -
consider the likes of the US NSDI and INSPIRE.
Meanwhile, in the real world, such as here in East
Africa, hurdles abound. Meanwhile, East Africa hosts a
community of practitioners as rich in expertise as
you'll find anywhere -and- with the added incentive of
having to respond to pragmatic demands in their own
backyard, every day of the week, using geo-information
issues. Nairobi alone hosts over 25 UN agencies'
offices, plus two CGIAR centres, numerous national
govenment agencies plus international NGOs ALL using
spatial data in our day-to-day work. Add to that the
commercial companies and the training institutions
helping build GIS capability and innovation. Factor in
our neighbours in Uganda, Tanzania and Ethiopia to the
count. Their combined area of operations extends to
south Sudan, eastern DRC, Somalia, the African Great
Lakes region and beyond. Any and all of these players
are paying heavily to duplicate each others data,
services and intellectual expertise. I want to look
for a better way.
My thesis is that, in East Africa, we have
requirements that -demand- rational use of geospatial
information coupled colocated with the concentrated
expertise to put SDI words into practice. Sure, we are
constrained by the reality of horrid, narrow,
unreliable and expensive telecommunications. Yes, we
have all the usual institutional disparirities over
policies governing data discoveryu, access and use.
Fine: let us find clever ways to use SDI principles to
combine our expensive technical resources to create
valuable, light-weight and accessible geo-information
products. Let us identify and work closely with
real-world partners lacking these resources but
closest to those dealing with social and environemntal
our agencies are charged to address. Let us at least
start to expose and tease aport some of the governance
and policy constraints.
So: this is an invitation for (informal) expressions
of interest from any and all of of you working in East
Africa, or with interests this region, to partipate in
an unfunded, unofficial but unfettered exploration of
SDI in practice. It will need identified users with
real requirements. It will require assessing the real
likelihood of adding value or reducing cost. We will
need to identify assets and line them up against
needs. We'll have to identify gaps in our capabilities
and work to bridge them. We'll need to find ways that
we can incrementally approach Perfect Solutions within
our existing work and budgets while demonstrating
success at each step along the way. We will walk
face-first into all the issues of institutional policy
and practice that define the realities of makeing data
exchange real.
Let me be clear upfront: I have no money from the UN
Environment Programme nor any other source to put into
this exercise. I cannot say that it is an official
designated element of the current programme of work. I
can say that it clearly fits into efoorts to reform
the UN ao it's "delivering as one", with the increased
emphasis for the UN to be responding to countries'
requirements, and in UNEP's own Bali Strategic Plan
for capacity building and technology transfer. I can
offer limited in-kind technical support to help
practitioners add SDI capabilities to their existing
technical assets - help with metadata authoring and
publishing tools like GeoNetwork: help with setting up
open source map servers and feature services (I hope
to help setting up discovery for those services, as
well): and help where necessary with on-line fora or
listservs to carry the debate on governance and
policy. I hope to maybe host a couple of technical
workshops at UNEP around mid-year, but that's it.
Okay, I'll also help document and publicize the
effort, and to work with my contacts to cast it into
wider audiences such as the GSDI (http://www.gsdi.org
), GEOSS(http://www,earthobservation.org ) and UN
efforts such as the UNSDI (http://www.ungiwg.org/unsdi
) and UN-ECA CODI ( www.uneca.org/codi/ ), and to use
the experiences gained to guide contributions to any
re-writes of the GSDO Cookbook that seem to be
u
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