A Busy and Productive Week

Our friends at the FAO Somalia water and land Information Management project (http://www.faoswalim.org) this week hosted a very successful 2-day workshop on remote sensing applications in the Horn of Africa region. From the SDI-EA perspective there were two major developments of the sort that really are only possible when you have a bunch of people standing around drinking coffee during the breaks.

The first was finally meeting up with the right people from the two CGIAR institutions here in Nairobi, namely the International Centre for Research in Agro-Forestry (http://www.worldagroforestry.org/) and the International Livestock Research Institute (http://www.ilri.org). The CGIAR is an network of international agricultural research institions and are big advocates of both spatial data analysis and interoperability. It has been a major frustration - and a considerable embarrassment - for me over the past three months to have not succeeded in engaging them in SDI-EA. That, now seems to be rectified and next week John and I expect to make some concrete progress with them.

The second coup was meeting up with one of the committee members of the Kenyan national spatial data infrastructure initiative (http://www.knsdi.go.ke). A few committee members have responded on the SDI-EA mailing list but his was the first face-to-face contact I'd managed. The reason this was particularly opportune was that there's the germ of an idea to have a regional consultation in late July between the UNSDI initiative and the national SDI efforts in the region, mostly to find out what expectations countries have about how a UNSDI ought improve their service from the UN. I would dearly love to have KNSDI convene that meeting in conjunction with UNEP, and early indications are that they're keen to do so.

Now all I have to do is get UNEP's agreement and get the thing organized in 5 weeks.

Oh, and by the way, it looks like the long-awaited hands-on training sessions for open web services that UNEP and FAO/SWALIM have been planning might actually happen in the next couple of weeks, now that SWALIM have gotten the workshop out of the way. Standy by for more details.

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.

Quick progress, slow reporting

The past week has been really, really good, except that it has taken this long to get around to describing it. (My colleague Johannes is now back in the office so there goes one excuse for slack blogging - I guess I can still blame the Easter break for some of the dead time).

But, anyway, we've actually made one tangible piece of progress towards SDI-EA: last Thursday, 5th of April 2007, can be encribed in the chronicles as the day that any two UN agencies here in Nairobi were able to share geospatial data services. Yes, FAO/SWALIM got their production WFS on-line at http://www.faoswalim.org:8080/geoserver and so along with UNEP's existing service at http://dewa03.unep.org/geoserver we are now able to separately and jointly serve data about Somalia to our colleagues in UNHCR, OCHA and the NGO community. The mugshot at left captures the info-warriors at their moment of victory [L to R John Mugwe (UNEP), Stephen Waswa (FAO), Mick Wilson (UNEP) and Craig von Hagen (FAO)].

The downside reality, of course, is that the comms links here in Nairobi remain a majors constraint, and the chances of anyone being able to reliably use these WFS's are pretty slim but at least a principle has been established.

And there are glimmers of hope on the horizon - this week's announcement of US$ 150 million support to kenya for broadband rollout has to help (sometime), plus the notion that the UN will real soon now be linked to the local ISPs exchange point, so at least internet traffic between UNEP and FAO won't have to go to Italy and back!