Almost another week past and continuing frustrations, notwithstanding the on-going interest in the exercise. In fact, I guess that's is the frustrating bit - I keep getting positive and enthusiastic responses from some really interesting-looking players and feel that I don't have the time to followup quickly eneough or in enough depth. I guess I fear that enthusiasm will wane if I don't keep the momentum up. Anyway, I hope that my colleague will be back next week and progress will be not so "gluey" as it has been in recent days.
Not to say that there's not progress: John and I are again off to FAO/SWALIM tomorrow to do install geoserver and postrgresql on their production server so that -yay!- another UN-tagged OGC-compliant system will be running in Nairobi. Perhaps not terribly zoomily but at least here, hosting East African data in here East Africa. Then all we have to do is get OCHA, UN Habitat and UNHCR enabled and at least one small target will have been met; then we'll have to start the extension to our neighbours and partners our there amongst the CG, the NGO's and so on.
We've also been boosting DEPHA (the Data Exchange Platform for the Horn of Africa - see http://www.depha.org ), up to an including getting a large chunk of high-value data for Mogadishu that the local humanitarian agencies really want but cannot afford at 160 Mb for the download plus the need to be able to host a geo-database. Fingers crossed we'll see this content (courtesy of UNOSAT) on air early next week. Strike another blow for intra-UN cooperation and brotherhood.
The SDI-EA effort also got a heathy boost being covered in the latest of GSDI's SDI-Africa newsletter. I suspect that's where the recent flurry of sign-ups to the tsk have gotten their inspiration. May this not be the last such time where we have good stuff to report!
Meanwhile, and most interestingly I feel, the one group from whom I've had least success in visibly signing onto SDI-EA are my erstwhile UN colleagues! I know they're interested and collaborative but for the life of me I just cannot get them to declare their interest publically, before the very communities that we're supposed to be impressing with out One-UN-ness.
I guess I'll just have to keep badgering them. Strange, really.
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1 comment:
ok stop badgering already!!
We as FAO-Somalia Water & Land Information Management are committed to the UN-SDI process. We will contribute and collaborate in anyway possible to get the East Africa UN-SDI up and running and we will publish as much Somalia data as is feasible.
Do i need to publicly declare support anywhere else :-)
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