SDI-EA metastasizing?

If SDI-EA was a cancer then it's showing worrisome signs of spreading. This afternoon John and I are off to the Nairobi off of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to help them bring up a web feature service.

Part of the original design concept for SDI-EA was for 'clustering'. The UN gang recognized that we really are few in numbers and short on resources so need to focus on interoperation amongst ourselves but with the goal of reaching outward to our respective sectoral communities - environment agencies, departments and NGO's in the case of UNEP, humanitarian agencies and NGO's in the case of UNHCR and OCHA, and so on. What I did not anticipate was that this spawning of second-generation sites would happen so rapidly - it's just weeks since we went to FAO/SWALIM to get their WFS running, now they're the ones promoting similar services to the likes of ICRC.

Of course, in a perfect world, it would be someone from FAO/SWALIM who would do the hand-holding with ICRC - John and I have to adopt a Teflon Approach here because cannot take on an infinite of dependants and, besides, it's better to spread the skill as widely as possible to avoid single points of future failure. Still, I really like the idea of this development and am happy to encourage it and more like it.