First-round responses and an emerging plan?

Well, the first round of responses to Saturdays' invitation are coming in, all positive so far. One, in particular, promoted me to start articulating the broad outlines of a plan as to wher this unofficial SDI-EA thing might be going. Please have a look and comment telling us what you think.

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Mick Wilson

03/19/2007 10:09 AM

To: Nyoike.Mugechi at bamburi.lafarge.com
cc:
Subject: Re: Invitation for Expession of Interest to participate in an East African SDI Mashup


Thank you for your support. At this stage there are neither dates nor venues for any meetings. My plan is, initially, to survey the field and see who's interested in contributing and, as far as possible, get some organization going without disrupting too much people day-to-day. We are a net-enabled group and I think we can get some momentum going without waiting for physical meetings.

Already, in a matter of days, we have offers between agencies to help with some swapping of basic skill slike setting up OGC web feature services. Call this phase zero, out of which comes a sort of directory of "who's who in East Africa SDI stuff" and at least an initial indicator of what their capabilities and/or needs might be. This is however just a proposal and I'm open to suggestions how better to proceed.

Once past phase 0 then would be the time perhaps for some more "formal" structure. We the UN gang have an obligation and capabilities to start getting our own house in order but we don't have the assets or mandate to attempt to solve all the problems this exercise uncovers. What we can do, however, is get organized with "clusters" of our neighbours - for example, UNEP with the conservation community, wildlife management and NGOs like Green Belt Movement; UN-Habitat with civil society and social equity NGOs - and try to use scanty UN assets to boost local capabilities. Call that phase 1, and that is probably the point where some "real" meeting would yield some real results and give the local players a chance to meet each other and the UN gang. This plausibly could happen in a couple of months' time, before everyone disappears for the northern summer.

Would you mind if I copied this response to the SDI-EA list?

PS Via which did you get the invitation? Where possible I want to drop the "list of lists" approach and get individuals registered so we can do our laundry within the community and reserving announcments to more public lists for when really neat things. It'll also make it easier for you to respond directly to the list without relying on me.

Cheers

Mick Wilson

Putting My Head on the Block

Usually, in my home country Australia, we'd describe what I've just done using a much more personal bit of the male anatomy, but there we are.

Without mandate, without permission, without budget or recognition, I have today invited a group of troublemakers within the United Nations system - and beyond - to launch a real-world attempt to build a spatial data infrastructure here in East Africa. "Yippee-yoo, and so what?", I hear you ask. Then consider these facts:

• we are trying to apply some absurdly advanced technologies - geographical information systems, satellite image analysis, data mining and integration - in a place that is very far removed from Silicon Valley or NASA HQ
• we have urgent and immediate humanitarian issues to respond to every day, with real peoples' lives and well-being and futures at stake
• we have to manage urgent environmental issues - wildlife conservation, sustainable resource usage, and on and on - most of which by their very nature cross boundaries, -whether national, cultural, social, tribal - that can only be bridged by fair and acceptable information
• we have a telecommunications infrastructure that stinks, and many of you reading this will have more bandwidth to you home than the whole of a country like Kenya.

So, on this thin trampoline of good intentions, a group of us working in UN bodies here in Nairobi, have taken it upon ourselves to do what - so far - has only partially been done with large-scale federally-funded initiatives, to whit: make a practical case that the open-standard principles of SDIs can really help disparate groups like UN agencies and their partners tackle deep and immediate problems in immediate and measurable ways. Can we cut waste? Can we cut the crap of agencies not sharing? Can we pull in more partners, like the US military, on the basis of goodwill and clever data access and sharing agreements.

Most of these problems have not yet been addressed in the "easy" parts of the world. And us dummies are going to take them on here.

Why such silliness?

Because Nairobi hosts an implausible concentration of skilled and capable individuals that can actually make this stuff work, to get the data flowing, with what are now mature technologies that can deployed open-source or proprietary - who cares, as long as they have open-standard interfaces - committed to address practical questions. In fact, we may have one of the densest concentrations of such players anywhere. If not, who cares?

There are over 25 UN agencies with offices (or headquarters) in Nairobi. There are two international agricultural research institutions (ILRAD and ICRAF), a colossal number of NGOs, universities, commercial players and government departments all using spatial data, and none of them effectively discovering, integrating or embellishing it. The duplication and waste is horrid. The frustrations are tangible. The bottlenecks are universal, well-known and largely ignored rather than tackled.

So this idealistic group now choose to tackle them. A core group of UN agencies - FAO, OCHA, UNEP, UNHCR, UN-Habitat and UN_ECA - will attempt to clean up one small corner of the UN's backyard as a step towards a UN Spatial Data Infrastructure, as a step towards the reformed UN's "Delivering as One", as a step towards increasing the value that the UN delivers to countries in this region, and in step with the social, economic and environmental needs of counties in this region.

I sincerely hope that subsequent posts are going to be way more about our collective experiences, frustration and surprises. I hope that what we do here can help Write The Book about how SDI might be done in other parts of the planet. I hope we actually make a measurable difference that we can take some small pride in.