RIP SDI-EA ver 1?

I am about to rant.

This blog has - let's face it - been pretty moribund this year and it's time to put it out of its misery, at least in its current form.

The good news is that the ad hoc SDI-East Africa effort, as it was, has been overtaken by events and - in a perfect world, rightfully - been made redundant. How so? Firstly, the work that started in 2007 was possible because certain individuals had enough institutional leeway to get away with it. Many of those individuals have moved to other organization, had their responsibilities shifted, or - as in my own case - found their institutions shifting around them. One key institution seems destined to non-existence, period.

Meanwhile, Kenya got off to a very rocky start to 2008 that focussed many origanizations' attention on life-and-death realities of addressing real humanitarian needs, not indulging in the abstract niceties of data sharing. A lot of institutional momentum was lost. November 2007 saw the SDI-EA showcase exercise for UNGIWG and then.... nothing.

So, now, to SDI-EA 2.0, or Son-of-SDI-EA, of SDI-EA - the Next Generation or whatever we seek to call it. Why will this be better, stronger and faster? Firstly, it seems that its natural institutional home is coming of age. A year ago, NASA and USAID opened negotiations around the notion of a SERVIR-Africa, building on the experiences building SERVIR at CATHALAC in Panama. SERVIR has been described before in this blog and elsewhere in ways that don't need re-hashing here. What is newsworthy is that, just over a week ago, Africa-SERVIR was inaugurated at the Regional Centre or Mapping for Resource Development (RCMRD) in Nairobi. The lights are on, the disks are spinning, the staff are trained. Now, let the apppications begin.

Why is RCMRD a 'natural home' for SDI-EA? Because it has a regional mandate to serve over 15 states. Because it is already a centre of technical excellence. Because it has a long track record - nearly 30 years - of international partnership and support from many OECD countries. because its management 'get' the notion of SDI as a necessary tool for national development in its constituent states, and because they are good neighbours to and collaborators in their host country's efforts to build a Kenyan national SDI. No agency of the UN system based in Nairobi has so many of the right attributes.

Secondly: the institutional context for the UN bodies that kick-started SDI-EA is also changing. Namely, the evolution of a UN SDI that stands to move these types of data and service sharing initiatives out of the realm of well-meaning amateurism into one that programme managers can understand and treat seriously. To whit: the meeting of UNGIWG in Vienna last month saw 31 UN agencies unanimously endorse a statement directed to the highest levels of UN management that SDI is a necessary capability in which the UN must invest.

The text of statement has not appeared on-line yet but the fact that such a variety of interests - headquarters, field operations, humanitarian, food security, disaster relief, environment, nuclear regulation, public health, security and peace keeping - sent such a clear message all the more powerful at a time when UN business is under heavy scrutiny and the demands for reform are strident. Yay. Back that statement up with a clear, deliverable work plan - also agreed at UNGIWG-9 - and it now almost becomes behoving upon UN management and donors as to why such a sensible, noble and widely-agreed recommendation ought not get the funding it needs.

So: SDI-EA can now legitimately be seen as the juxtaposition between delivery a UN-wide joined-up services and a regional-wide clientele leveraged by RCMRD, an example of what I think of as an 'apex network' - the type of hight value single point of contact through which the limited resources of the UN can reach the greatest number of Member States. Let UNEP work across eastern and southern Africa with RCMRD and with UNHCR and FAO and UNIDO and WHO to join up services to focus on issues of environment and health, or climate change and ecosystem management, or the social and environmental dimension of agri-business such biofuels.

Let the applications begin. Roll on SDI-EA 2.0

Benefits of Open Access Data Policies

Tom hammond at IUCN Canada posted the following to the Conservation Commons mailing list today. It describes the measurable impact felt when Canada opened up access to what had previously been fee-based access to standard framework national data sets, and you'll see that the result is impressive.

What I will be more curious to see is what effect this has on the quality of these data once they're being used more by more people in more different applications - more aggressively perhaps - and the Government starts getting specific feedback about inaccuracies, omissions and required updates. A key component of the "Better Data Sooner" mantra is that community-driven feedback is the best driver for custodians' continuous improvement of their data products and services.

Perhaps the Canadians are providing a real-world laboratory in which to test this theory.

" The HYPERLINK http://www.cits.rncan.gc.ca/cit/servlet/CIT/site_id=01&page_id=1-005-002-001.html National Topographic Data Base (NTDB) comprises digital vector data sets that cover the entire Canadian landmass. This product includes thirteen“layers” such as hydrography, hypsography and the road network.

" The NTDB is a complete and uniform product that can be highly useful in a broad range of activities– such as planning, research,conservation work,and private sector development. For example, it can be used for preparing thematic maps and makes it suitable for geographic information system (GIS) applications because the NTDB and its attributes make it possible to use a variety of spatial analysis techniques.

" Downloads of NTDB data during the government fiscal year ending in 2007, when a fee for use policy was still in place, numbered under100,000. A change of policy was enacted during the current fiscal year making the NTDB an open access resource– during which downloads jumpedby a magnitude of 54to well over 5 million."

HYPERLINK http://www.thinkwell.ca/cgdi-icdg/libraryDocs/FeevsFree.pdf

'Scraping'the web for geo-information

By now most of us will have seen the joint ESRI/Google announcements at Where 2.0 about the upcoming ability to use Google Earth and Google Maps to discover, locate and portray geo-data hosted in ESRI ver 9.3 geo-server stacks to be released later this year.

In the interest of balance (and with no desire to provoke any flame wars) I draw your attention to another announcement at Where 2.0 addressing Geoserver's upcoming 1.7.0 release with similar capability - see http://blog.geoserver.org/2008/05/13/geoserver-and-googles-geo-search/

The point here is not about commercial versus free versus proprietary versus open source software. It's about two other more important things.

First: the maturation and acceptance of standards. Google has embraced the OGC specifications process and KML is now an anointed OGC standard; ESRI has embraced the OGC specifications standard and is positioning its products appropriately (e.g. ver 9.3 will also provide a fully-compliant web feature service as well as full support for PostgreSQL/PostGIS back-ends). The more this momentum build the more of this joined-up capability we'll all benefit from.

Second: the maturation and acceptance of visualization tools for non-specialists. If the Google/ESRI announcement had happened 5 years ago there'd have been barely a ripple outside the hard-core GIS community. The fact that The Rest of Us can now contemplate being able to publish geo-information (whether social and community based, conservation-related or whatever) --and-- have it discovered, integrated, employed and appreciated by non-specialists audiences via attractive spinny-globe-type-products is a powerful combination.

What is crucial here, and to me will make or break this effort, is the ready availability of easy-to-use tools to take my existing geo-data and get it into a search-able, discover-able, use-able form without having to have a masters degree and without having to learn to speak techno-babble. And that is equally true whether 'I' am individual Mick Wilson or whether 'I' am a multi-national conglomerate.

We need to keep lowering the bar to the publishing of real-world data about real-world events by real-world-people.

A Little Ray of Sunshine

Well! Finally some light falling upon what has been a decidedly dark and gloomy SDI-EA landscape over the past few months, at least I hope so for the practitioners in this region.

I yesterday discovered that, after almost a year of hushed expectation, the UN in Nairobi has finally gotten operational with KIX, the local Kenyan internet exchange point. The upshot is that users of any of the local network providers in Kenya now have much better access to web services operated at UNEP Headquarters. And by 'much' I mean that I tested it from home last over my dial-up connection and response times to sites like http://dewa03.unep.org/geoserver/ or http://www.dephadata.org were about 1/20th what they used to be. The practical consequence is that there is now a chance for real operational interoperation with partners in Nairobi like KNSDI (who, by the way, have started operating a geo-portal at http://212.49.76.177:8080/Portal), the CG centres, FAO/SWALIM, KWS, ACC and the like. The long-awaited showcases recommended at the Better Data Faster workshop last October might start making better headway.

And for the tech-heads out there - why does the KIX link make so much difference? Because, up until last week, internet packets going from my house in Nairobi to servers at UNEP Nairobi had to go all the way to Canada, across to Italy then back to Nairobi via the UN satellite links; of course, responses from the servers then had to traverse that path the other way a total of 4 satellite hops to geostationary orbit and back and each introducing 750 ms latency because of the finite speed of light. It was impossible to get a response in less than 3 seconds, no matter how speedily the servers at UNEP run. Then there's the factor of congestion i.e. that the satellite links are expensive and therefore kept as narrow as possible, which means at peak times packets have to queue and so are further delayed. In short, the UNEP internet experience was less than dazzling for folk here in east Africa. The link to KIX eliminates all that fiddling around with satellites and enables a brisker user experience. Yay.

So, why have these past months been "dark and gloomy"? A number of factors...

First was the whole disturbed environment in Kenya at the start of the year, which rightly preoccupied most GIS workers either professionally or domestically, so there was little chance to maintain momentum. Secondly, I lost my loyal and faithful sidekick John Mugwe for lack of contract renewal. When it came to delivering hands-on training about geographic web services in local institutions, John was far better able to communicate the practicality of OWS setup and operations than I ever was with my tendency to talk over peoples' heads. So the whole capacity building effort has ground to a halt as well. Thirdly, UNEP as a whole and the section where I work (the Division of Early Warning and Assessment) has been going through a protracted period of programme re-alignment, so it's been back-to-back management retreats for the better part of a month, with all that that entails about re-crafting work plans, drafting strategy papers and the likes. Little time left to even think about SDI-EA.

Anyway, I hope that's all history and that we can get back on track. We've just gone past the first anniversary of SDI-EA (yay, again) and I guess we can point to some progress but still have a ways to go....

And a question for next time: we now have the global geospatial xperts social networking site, which has in a few days attracted an impressive amount of talent (over 620 players) from around the world. I have set up an SDI-EA group there and now wonder: should I migrate this blog that new home? Your opinions, please.

Life and Times in Nairobi

The post-election violence in various parts of Kenya was front-page news for at least two or three days, a remarkably long period. Kenya will be months or years recovering from the aftermath, one dimension of which is more than 200,000 people estimated by the UN to have been displaced. Setting up camps and safe-guarding the inhabitants, ensuring food and medical supplies, establishing and maintaining sanitation are task that will keep UN agencies, NGOs, IGOs, church groups and the Government engaged long after the story has ceased to be even page 10 newsworthy.

The crisis has - no surprise here - exposed a number of shortcomings in the management of the information needed to plan and manage responses. The story has been the same old confusion, duplication, crossed efforts and lost time that always seems to mark such times. Yes, of course, crises always occur at the most inconvenient time and the circumstances in Kenya were particularly confounding - key staff are out of town or out of the country because it's still holiday time here means that many ; the UN in Nairobi effectively closed down for the whole Christmas - New Year week and then stayed closed for the first week of January, with staff ostensibly 'working' from home so no access to servers or datasets that weren't visible to the internet; some key staff who happen to have data on their computers can't get to office safely. Mostly, though it exposes the fact that few agencies as yet manage and publish their data in ways that enable true use and re-use a la SDI.

Pertinent points include:

• UN bodies in New York seeking to upgrade their security plans for Nairobi, and looking for the data used to create the last set of maps, couldn't find them and contacted me (at home) by e-mail (on a Friday night) wondering if I could find the right people they think might have had the right data;
  
• the custodians of the data respond, but one's out of town on holiday, one is in town but cannot get to the office, and anyway the data are on the hard disk of a third staff member's PC and they don't have the password;
• the data were never published to the web, nor was their metadata, because they were prepared as a small contract job and no-one thought there'd be any re-use. Whoops.
• a colleague in another agency not only has the requested data (not just the PDFs) but even better built up for their own purposes since, but shouldn't distribute them as per agreement with their originator... but then again his agency has rectified the data and extended their attributes so, yes, okay, he sends the data to New York, who are appropriately appreciative...
• ...except that the data dispatched are in a proprietary format because that's what they use in their office. Does New York use the same software? I have no idea but would think it a damn shame if NY couldn't use the data for lack of a software license...
  
• ...and, meanwhile, a third colleague charged with coordinating information management for humanitarian response is sending out requests to the same people for the same type of data, admittedly for different application but still involving the same players in more work.
  

They foregoing highlights just how far we have to go with an exercise like SDI-EA before we can claim real legitimacy:

• where is the one-stop shop catalogue discovery system that would enable to New York to at least confirm the identity of the custodian of the original data? Such catalogues are alive and kicking in Nairobi (see FAO/SWALIM's GeoNetwork node) as resources for the community - why aren't they being used?
  
• where are the metadata being routinely published that describe the sort of interim data products that underlay the UN security plans, that in a very real sense have been produced using taxpayers money, but are allowed to languish in dark cupboards?
• where is the sense of planning for re-use, of seeking to maximize return-on-investment on these data products? Why is it not yet routine that all data end up in managed repositories from where maybe they could be published to the web? in vendor-neural formats that guarantee their re-usability?
  
• where are the instances data improvers being willing to return to the data originator the enhancements that they've made? Can we ever expect to do better than using the same old tired framework layers from DCW or whatever if no-one is prepared to feed back to authoritative custodians their improvements made to baseline products?
• where are the mechanisms by which data improvements can be proposed or lodged? How many data distributors have procedures in place for dealing with feedback from their users when it comes to quality improvement?
  

Sorry to start the New Year with a rant like this but these issues are to important to not grasp an opportunity to highlight them. Fine we can talk melodramatically about "life and death situations in Kenya" and not be entirely exaggerating, but even the prosaic tasks of getting food distributed to camps on time, or ensuring that water is tanked from the most accessible clean sources, can help alleviate an otherwise completely miserable situation for thousands and thousands of people.

Showing the World

Yesterday was one of the coolest and most satisfying in a long time. We finally got to show an international audience that SDI-East Africa is at least taking baby steps and could in the another year or so start walking confidently and even be running, skipping and jumping.

The venue was the 8th session of the UN Geographic Information Working Group (UNGIWG). Long-time readers might recall was that it was at the UNGIWG meeting last year that the first seeds of SDI-EA were planted, then heavily fertilized at the UNGIWG Global Partners' Meeting earlier this year. So it was somewhat satisfying to return to that forum and show that their inspiration had wrought.

The previous post post to this blog noted that, since the East African consultation back in October, there'd been a flurry of inspired activity to actually get data-sharing services on line. Yesterday we were able to show how flood-related data, originating from four different UN agencies (UNHCR, OCHA, FAO/SWALIM, UNEP and GEMS/Water) and hosted on three different servers in Nairobi and one in Canada, could be at least visually integrated to provide humanitarian relief managers with both synoptic and detailed views of potential impacts on refugees and displaced persons in the region. Across a variety of open-source and commercial services, all agreeing to 'speak' an OGC-standard interoperability dialect called Web Feature Services.

These views were previously separately available but never before brought together on demand. We were also able to showcase the crucial role to be played by facilities such as the inter-agency Data Exchange Platform for the Horn of Africa (DEPHA) as a broker publishing data on behalf of agencies that cannot afford or lack mandate to build the capacity to publish data on-line themselves. The KML needed for spinning the showcase up in Google Earth is <here>. Give me a month or so to get back from leave and I'll have equivalent packages for NASA WorldWind, MS Virtual Earth, uDIG and QGIS, all working off the same services

The amazing part is that it worked. Not just the technology, but the message - UN agencies field and regional offices can actually afford the luxury of starting to think about this sort of inter-operation. The technology hurdles are not the insurmountable barrier so often assumed.

Yes, the scenario shown was limited and somewhat contrived. Yes, there were many, many components of a true SDI missing, like the abilities to discover and integrate additional mdata sources, or to discover and display stuff using the correct UN-standard symbols, or even to know the most basic background information about where the data originate or how they can realistically be used. On the other hand, others here in the UNGIWG meeting do Get It and are keen to start plugging gaps in the next year - FAO Geonetwork will work with us to plug the discoverability gaps; OCHA will work with FAO to get symbologies hosted, discoverable and accessible; WFP with the UN Joint Logistics Centre and the ITHACA project will starte getting their transportation data model to integrate automatically to help drive the symbology and portrayal needs. All good, One-UN sort of stuff! I believe we have a viable kernel around which the emerging UN spatial data infrastructure will gain and document its own experiences and growing pains and lessons learned.

Now I just have to convince my bosses to let me keep up my involvement in all this as we move into next year's shiny new work programme!

I'm off on holiday for three weeks. I may or may not be inspired to follow up this post soon - I should: there were some interesting chats with the ESRI rep that bear telling.... If I don't, and happy end-of-year/ mid-winter/ mid-summer/ whatever season to you all

Sunshine and Happiness

A few months back I realized that, after six months of collective SDI-A effort, there was not actually any more data flowing in East Africa than before when we started the exercise. I got all despondent and sort of lost interest in maintaining this blog. Silly me. Events during the past three weeks have brought the sunshine back into the world of SDI-EA.

The first was the meeting at the end of October that brought together over 40 of the SDI-EA players in East Africa under the theme of Better Data Sooner to consider the question of how best a United Nations SDI would have to be run to be most useful to countries, organizations and societies in the region. Yes, there were all the recommendations about how the UN ought to help SDI proponents with getting policies and standards in place, with finding capacity building opportunities, with getting data flowing out of the UN system while providing opportunities for governments, NGOs and sectoral programmes to publish their data into the UN system. There's more about the SDI-Live effort at http://dewa03.unep.org/live-sdi/ and the report should be out Real Soon Now. I'll describe the motivation for the meeting in a later post but suffice to say it s recommendations seem needed as input to the upcoming UN Geographic Information Working Group UNGIWG meeting in Bangkok when we consider UNSDI implementation over the next year.

What was the real surprise was that, having recognized the crucial necessity of communicating clearly with senior policy types, the participants hit on the notion of building SDI showcases around realistic and solid scenarios that managers could associate with. What was even more surprising was they actually went off and started doing it. Within the space of 10 days we went from having only one real internet-accessible source of data on the network in East Africa (that being UNEP) to having nearly half a dozen - FAO/SWALIM, UNHCR, OCHA, UN-Habitat - and can start telling meaningful stories: a lot of the current data being served concerns the floods across Africa during 2007, their potential impacts on refugees and displaced persons. All of this can be spun up in Google Earth, WorldWind, desktop GIS and the likes. Have a look at this bit of KML ( http://dewa03.unep.org/sdi-ea/system/files/SDI-showcase.kmz ) or at least the screen caps here and here to get an idea where this might go.

It's actually becoming necessary to think about getting a services registry going for this part of world!

Now, how to maintain this momentum? How to use this profile to get more services running - RCMRD, are you reading this?

Moving Refugees

This is unprecedented! Two contributions from one person in one day!!

Firstly: A bunch of us got an e-mail today from John Marinos at the UNHCR Somalia. I begged and pleaded and he finally relented to me posting his message to the SDI-EA blog. Why? Because to it's got all (well, many) the right elements we seek in SDI-EA: innovative communication, collaboration within a community etc. etc. Of course, in my version of A Perfect World you'd be posting these data to the likes of SWALIM and/or DEPHA and, through the magic of interoperablnes finding it being served in ready-to-use guises through Google Maps or Google Earth, GIS clients and flat browsers, all at no extra cost. I guess we got a ways to go yet but I think it's a goal worth bearing in mind. Anyway, John's KML is posted at http://dewa03.unep.org/downloads/UNHCR_IDPs_Sep06_to_Aug07.kmz

"Dear colleagues,

"This email attempts to kill 3 birds with one stone... as the saying goes.

"1) I am distributing to the usual suspects, the latest version of the PMT [That's Population Movement Tracking for those of us outside humanitarian space. Mick] database. This version is the same as the one circulated last month but now includes the movements from August 2007. It is for your use, and if you'd like to post it for dissemination on GeoNetworks or DEPHA (as a WFS) then go for it. The attached zip file contains the data as a shape file, along with metadata and a document to explain the fields in the table.

"2) Also attached is the latest PMT map. Feel free to put this on ReliefWeb, GeoNetworks, OCHA-Somalia, or wherever.

"3) Lastly, I've been trying to find a way for people to see and appreciate the scale of IDP [Internally Displaced Persons a.k.a refugges that haven't crossed an international border. Mick] movements in Somalia. With the help of Craig Von Hagen, who forwarded a useful email to me we've put together a KMZ file that allows you to use Google Earth (v.4) to view the locations of IDPs and the reasons for movement - per month. It covers the period Sep 2006 until August 2007.

"By double clicking on the KMZ file below it should open Google Earth (assuming that you have it installed on your machine). It includes the districts of Somalia along with 12 maps (actually image overlays) each showing locations where IDPs have moved for that particular month (according to PMT reports received by our partners). Each location is color coded* by the reason for displacement** If you have Google Earth version 4 installed, it will recognize the time tags and a sliding bar will appear at the top of your screen - to the left of your navigation control. This will allow you to "scroll" through time and see the different monthly maps. Notice how Nov 07 had a lot of flood displacement? Notice the displacement because of insecurity from Feb till now, with a lull in May? The goal is to provide you with an easy to use (and very cool) tool to view the data we've collected on IDP movements this last year. The secondary goal is to stop me from making PP presentations with this same information.

"Some problems:
"* I don't know how to put a legend in Google Earth. Therefore there is a PDF attached showing what the different colored dots mean.
"** There are some locations that have 2 different reasons for movement in the same month. (i.e. Some people moved to Baydhaba because of drought, some people because of insecurity). In these cases only one reason for movement is displayed. I've tried unsuccessfully to fix the situation. I'll continue to try. Remember this is only a test!

"If you are one of the techies who would like more information on the methodology of the PMT project or on other Protection Cluster initiatives, don't hesitate to ask. If you're a non-techy and want to know more about the data we have available and how best to use it, don't hesitate to ask.

"I look forward to your comments on the KMZ file.

"Best Regards,"

Secondly, later also from John:

"In other exciting news. I've used my fancy new upgraded MapInfo to log onto DEPHA's Geoserver.
http://dewa03.unep.org/geoserver/wfs?request=GetCapabilities&service=WFS&version=1.0.0
I've even downloaded the (old) Admin boundaries for Somalia. Look! Its there now. I'm using data on my PC thats sitting on your server. How cool is that!?!

"Now that I'm able to party with you guys, may I kindly request that you post some data sets that may of interest to the community.
"1) IDP settlements in Somalia
"2) IDP locations
"- these are different. #1 is the actual IDP settlement within various towns in Somalia. #2 are the towns/villages that have received IDPs over the last few months.

"Now that Somalia is covered I'm sure there are regional datasets that our Regional Hub can send over that people are sure to enjoy.

"Forgive me if I"m jumping the gun a little. You guys at DEPHA are not our personal data posters.. Let us know if you're interested in this data, then in what format it should be in to be the easiest for you to work with. Also bear in mind that this data gets updated frequently.

"Viva la EA-SDI!!!!
"JOHN"

Not a bad day's work, I think.

Back to the Conservation Community, and our First Abject Failure

Hmmm. It would seem that my subconsience has been censoring me, probably to prevent embarrassment to both of us. I did in fact write this up a month ago and somehow have just not posted it...

The SCGIS conference back in July brought two important potential follow-ups for SDI-EA, one being with Kenya Wildlife Service to get them to start spinning their protected areas data into the World Protected Areas database (a long-standing goal, yet to be realized), and the second with the Africa Conservation Centre. ACC support SCGIS and are motivated players in the SDI game, and I see them as a potential lynch-pin on regional SDI service targeting the conservation and resource management communities.

So, John and I are off to Lan'gata to meet up with Lucy Waruingi and other friends. And, lo!, they have a little linux (Fedora) server running as their relay for e-mail via and always-on satellite link and with a static IP address. Looks like a piece of cake to get the geoserver in place and set up a Geonetwork node for them, avoiding some of the pitfalls we struck with ICRC. Wrong.

You think you've covered all that bases, that you've planned for all the hardware wrinkles and variants, which you have a good flexible toolkit able to provide the work-arounds you need. More wrong.

We have all our installation software on USB devices. Obviously. So convenient. Does Lucy's server see the USB ports? Of course not. Shoot. Do we know ho to get Fedora to mount the USB ports? Of course not, we only ever cut our teeth using Mandriva and the commands it provides are not the real, low-level unix ones and so we get caught out. Who knows: maybe the server, being intended solely as a mail relay, has some minimal kernel not built with such luxuries as hotplug support. The point is that John and I should better anticipate these realities. Once again, going back to first principles is shown to be the wise move and, once again, we get caught when we cut corners.

Yes, of course, plugging this knowledge gap should take 10 minutes on the net with Google but it's late Friday afternoon and everyone wants to go home and we look like donkeys anyway. Not the best of time for thinking straight. I still think it will be a great face-saver if the USB ports turn out to be kaput anyway, but I have no faith in this.

Oh well, no problem, I've got all the software on DVD as well. But: why won't Lucy's server read the DVDs? Shoot, again! It's not a DVD reader, is it? It's a CD-ROM reader, and of course the UNEP Brains Trust does not have the software on CD. Total frustration. Go home and drink beer.

So, of course, no we're well equipped with many copies of software on CD-ROM and low-level knowledge of how to talk nicely to USB ports on all sorts of linux systems, and look forward to mounting a triumphant return expedition to ACC to rescue our sullied reputations. But I can't help but wonder "What's going to catch us next time?"

A Matter of Reliability

What do you learn in a community-building exercise when the community building almost fails to happen?

One obvious answer is "Ahh, forget it. We are none of us perfect. Try again and it'll be better". Another is "Well, you guys have failed sometimes; cut some slack to the others". Both are fair answers. But the question itself, and the quality of the answers, underpin a more crucial aspect of the governance of 'bottom up' SDI's, namely how do we fare when, later on, there are services over which we've built our own value-adding services and, tomorrow, the service custodian goes out of business, so to speak: a change of policy, a shift in budgets, loss of key personnel. Any number of reasons might pertain, but suddenly our customers are no longer happily receiving their service.

The point is that when you expose open-standards services to the web then I can come along and build on your service, adding a new value or servicing a new audiences that you hadn't planned for. Sure, you can argue that I'd be at least slightly daft to build a critical need on your service without some sort of agreement, let alone recognition. Okay, but, when I try to make a phone call to the other side of the world, my success or failure depends on a whole chain of agreement between telco operators, any one of which can fail just when I need the service. To what degree can I blame my local telco? Not much, if the failure is three networks away in Outer Mongolia. Problem is that it doesn't matter to me where the failure is - my call hasn't gone through. I'm an unhappy frustrated customer.

So, Tuesday should have been a neat day - meeting with the secretariat of the Kenyan national SDI, with two purposes were in mind, Firstly, helping them set up for evaluation some open-standards tools for establishing a national metadata archive, and the ability to serve geo-spatial data directly to remote clients (Geonetwork and geoserver, respectively). Secondly - and more importantly for me - engaging KNSDI's help to organise a meeting in September where we hope to get together all the national SDI players in East Africa along with their UN counterparts. The purpose? Try to start mapping the institutional interfaces that will be needed between the national and regional SDIs and the emerging UN spatial data infrastructure counterpart.

The UN is meant to serve member states, and the UN relies upon member states to provide data and services needed to inform and address trans-national and global issues. If a UNSDI's purpose is (amongst other things) to promote interoperability, shall this be on the basis of 'best effort' by the member states? Is the UN obliged to help members meet minimum levels of reliability and accountability? If so, what levels, and who is to measure and ensure them? If not, what is tolerably good enough, and what happens when gaps in data availability or reliability lead to flawed assessments or decisions? These and many more questions require attention, probably over and over as methods and approaches are tried.

So what happened? The Nairobi traffic Gods frowned, and three out of the four KNSDI participants got stuck in a jam. Could happen anywhere, couldn't it? Could as easily have been a delayed flight, a flood, or sick child to deal with. You bet, all very normal and we can schedule around it and (I hope) we can get our regional meeting organized notwithstanding.

But it did seem to me a specially pertinent reminder that, as we in SDI-EA try to promote SDI and build interoperability amongst distributed services, that the fragility of the communications and transportation infrastructures remain a constraint. What does it mean if we can implement a world-class on-line repository for satellite images in Nairobi if operational agencies and NGOs cannot access it precisely when needed? Who is liable if, in three or five years' time, humanitarian services' crucial decisions are delayed by lack of reliable data services.

Tough questions that won't go away if we ignore them. Neither, it seems to me, are they likely to be more easily answered unless we start now to articulate and specify the requirements to which telcos and other service providers can respond on a fair and contractual basis.

Anyway, we were back to KNSDI on Wednesday, had a happy and fruitful meeting to organize the consultation, and John at least got through the Geoserver installation training. We'll still need more time to get Geonetwork in and running for them, but at least we hit this important milestone and - fingers crossed - the KNSDI folk will like it enough to move it across to their production server. I'll be especially pleased if we can go into the September workshop with Survey of Kenya delivering on-line one of their signature framework data layers, like administrative boundaries. That really would be a feather in the collective caps. But only if it can be made reliable.

Teflon rules!

Friday two weeks back was the day I've been waiting for - the day the Teflon Principle seemed to actually kick in.

John and I were invited to join Byron from RCMRD (http://www.rcmrd.org in a trip to meet the staff from the Geomatics Unit at the Jomo Kenyatta University for Agriculture and Technology (http://www.jkuat.ac.ke). Professor Gacahri out there is one of the movers in the KNSDI, and had responded to Byron's suggestion that some of the staff out there be given a walk-through on what, in practice, participating in operational SDI could mean to them.

The first surprise was thelab facilities. Remember, I've been in East Africa since the times when a simple PC cost a lecturer's annual salary, a single diskette cost 10 dollars, and too many undergraduate's use of GIS was limited to what they could read about in text books. Here were 30-odd PCs, a functioning LAN and good internet connectivity. My, how things change. And not a bad start at all.. no server, though.

During discussions two interesting things emereged: the first being that, when they'd had the Geonetwork toolkit described to them, the JKUAT staff immediately saw its usefulness to teh school as a potential publisher and provider of geospetial information (as well as the - to me - more obvious attraction of being able to find stuff). The second, and the one that always makes John happiest, is when they twigged that establishing and managing a geospatial would not only streamline their data provision to the students but would open up the possibility for lateral integration of data across studies, rather than just vertically within them. John's alway happiest when this data cohesion aspact emerges spontaneously.

So, the followup is that somewhere towards end of August John and Byron and I will be back out to JKUAT to do the full-blown hands-on training with the Geomatic facluty, and then two weeks after that to do another with the final-year students, though for that one I'll push that it should be the faculty that do it, with John and other's back-stopping them. Like I say, we have to maintain the Teflon Principle, and the idea of a centre of excellence emerging at a school that's already leading the effort for geospatial awareness in the region, achieveing it without any massive financial outlay, and doing it collaboratively with the RCMRD and their training services seems like a marriage made in heaven.

Frustrated Ambitions

One purpose of attempting SDI-EA has been (optimistically?) to test how feasible SDI technologies are outside OECD-type countries, using the UN's own capacities to augment local infrastructure where needs be. Over the last two week has been an exercise in frustrated realization of what the limits can be like.

It all started with a flurry of requests for data and land cover change analysis - one from the GEF evaluation office, the second from a UNEP study of refugee camps, the third from researchers in land use conflict avoidance in Kenya and Tanzania. All good stuff and, thinks I, a good chance to test some of my theories against cold, hard reality.

All these requesters, by thge way, were suffering from the delusion that UNEP/GRID still acted as some sort of massive data archive that would have the necessary data on hand. Alas, no. That's a business model that went the way of the dodo many years ago. Frustration #1 was discovering that our own backyard is in desperate need of a cleanup - the Landsat data and stuff that I know NASA delivered to us years ago is nowhere to be found. Or, more accurately, no-one knows where to find it. Oh dear.

Anyway, this is the age of the internet and postals and all we need do is know how to find the data and use our satellite capacity to pipe it into Kenya for our clients, right? Theory says that we can be clever and use on-line services to slice out justthe bits of the images for relevant study areas - a few megabytes rather than 10's or hundreds of them, smart use of limited bandwidth, more readily accesible to users in developing countries and so on.

Second frustration: NASA's geobrain (http://geobrain.laits.gmu.edu/) usually provides a neat web coverage service whereby you designate your are of interest and it goes off, interrogates the LAITS catalogues and comes back with thumbnails of the available scenes; you make your selection and it then goes to the WCS, excises the footprint you've selected and send a nicely bundled tar package your way in a matter of minutes. What's wrong with this picture? Just the fact that the services is off the air this week. Sigh

So now I'm using sites that only deliver full scenes, such as the Global Land Cover Facility's Earth Science Data Interface (http://glcfapp.umiacs.umd.edu:8080/esdi/index.jsp). Obviously a much greater demand on our satellite link but worth a try. Except for the fact that the link has been slow and flakey and up and down all week - what might otherwise be an easy 20 minute 16 Mb transfer sometimes taking half a day. Sigh. Not the sort of reliable service we'd like to offer our partners.

Glad I didn't offer to mortgage the house as guarantee of being able to deliver on the requests made to us. Maybe things will be better next week. It's still not a great advertisement for SDI, is it?

------------------------ 24 Hours later ---------------------------
Well, things have picked up a bit, and last night I actually managed to pull down 4 MMS scenes and a full TM set, a total of about 350 Mb - not a huge volume of data in these days of streaming media but significant in this part of the world. Now, if only GeoBrain start behaving itself....

--------------- ... and 24 Hours after that? ----------------------
Well, some hacks and work-arounds later, I've managed to pull down about 10 Thematic Mapper and half a dozen MSS scenes, a total of about 2 gigabytes of compressed data moved as scheduled downloads overnight while UNEP's bandwidth is mostly unused. Frustration the Thjird:As it turns out, the usefulness of all this data was pretty limited, usually because the change signals being sought were not significant at the resolution of the Landsat data. This is where having had Geobrain working earlier would have really helped: at least the limitations of the images would have been apparent earlier and more quickly, and the requesters could have adapted their expectations.

Now, this gets me thinking: why am I downloading data from Maryland anyway? What if the Regional Centre for Mapping Resource Development here in Nairobi could bring its Landsat archive on-line, a sort of Geobrain East Africa? Must have a word with my friend Byron about that possibility...

SDI Reaching the Conservation Community

The Society for Conservation GIS last week held their first three-day conference hosted here at the UN compound in Nairobi. SCGIS is an ESRI-supported advocacy group that - as the name implies - promotes uptake of GIS as a conservation analysis, planning and communication. There are nearly 200 eager young minds from Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda here presenting and receiving collective wisdom and experience.

They've all also had their minds expanded by such luminaries of the world of conservtaion as Nobel laureate Wangarai Maathai, ex-head of the Kenya Wildlife Service, David Western, and world-reknowned elephant researcher Iain Douglas-Hamilton. Much of the material is what you might expect of traditional wildlife-and-protected-area conservation issues; others, however, have focus on community-based conservation effort, and one, for heaven's sake, concerned the determination of genetic diversity of the Bongo (Kenya's most endangered antelope).

The fact that UNEP has ended up helping sponsor SCGIS is entirely the result of accidentally meeting the powerhouse behind their efforts, Lucy Wariungi. That accidental meeting arose from having gotten another spur from Kate Lance about a Kenyan metadata presentation slated for an ICT conference back in February. I ran away from work (our Governing Council, in fact) and gate-crashed the conference and, thus, ended up taking tea with Lucy and with Richard Okello Oluoch of KWS. Life has not been the same since.

John and I have, of course, taken the chance to subvert some impressionable young people to the joys of SDI. This has been instructive inasmuch as the vast majority of these students and their lecturers are of the mindset of having to build their own stacks - gather their data, hardware, software, skills and personnel in one room and then start their analysis. The potential for component-based services is a novelty and EA-SDI just had to grab the opportunity to prosetalyze. So we've had one keynote presentation (here 9Mb, sorry) on SDI in general, the UNSDI and the SDI-EA effort; another keynote from Craig von Hagen about FAO's SDI-without-being-an-SDI, plus a tech workshop demonstrating open-standards publishing data, plus lots of Q&A over coffee and samosas. A serendipitous discovery on Friday resulted from a presentation by a small start-up company in Nakuru out there promoting open standards and open source on a commercial basis - it would seem that John and I have been out there undermining his market not even aware of his existence. Whoops. Must work on a bit of capacity building to remedy that!

There are two really nice outcomes of all this is. One is that there are now at least half a dozen local 3rd-year students seriously pursuing me to help them organize internships with UNEP, a task that I relish. The second is that we have a have finally nailed down Kenya Wildlife Services for a WFS installation session with John and Mick. This means (fingers crossed) that we'll then be that many steps closer to another goal of mine, namely getting national authorities able to directly load to the World Database of Protected Areas ( http://sea.unep-wcmc.org/wdpa ) starting with a showcase here in East Africa, namely, KWS.

Well, actually, there may be three possible nice outcomes, the third being the possibility of trying to schmooze an invitation to Mpala Ranch and Research Centre out on the Laikipea Plateau to see of we can't get some interoperability going there. If it does work out then that's one that I'll do with Sabrina and Mikele rather that with John.

The next task is to try sell Lucy on the idea of SCGIS becoming advocate for evolving an East African conservation SDI... get all these important researchers to actually start doing something about serving data and information to their colleagues, especially the ones across the borders in Tanzania and Uganda. What you think, Lucy?

Whoops! Unanticipated Blessings Upon SDI-EA

One of the participants in last Thursday's hands-on training was Daniel Olilo from the regional remote sensing centre here in Nairobi, the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD http://www.rcmrd.org). RCMRD's constituency is member states from Djibouti to Zambia and a bunch of affiliates - in other words they cover the are very much of interest to SDI-EA AND they have the ear of their governments.

Anyway, Daniel went enthusiastically and enlightenedly back to work and, on Monday, pitches the whole open-standards publishing-to-the-web thing to his director, Wilbur Ottichelo, a man I've known and worked with for over 15 years. Wilbur calls me on Tuesday looking for a meeting and a chance to follow up on this tech support question. I say "yeah, sure" - we've been hoping for months to get RCMRD on board SDI-EA for all sorts of reasons: a centre of technical expertise, a long history of collaboration with UNEP and FAO, close engagement with the Kenyan national SDI effort, and so on and so on. A natural partnership, even stronger with their establishment of a Geonetwork Opensource node (http://www.rcmrd.org/geonetwork/) already publishing ISO 19115 metadata to the web. Wilbur and I agree that John and I will pop over Thursday afternoon which, by pure happenstance, will follow my director's meet-and-greet with Wilbur that morning.

So, off we go, have a quickie guided tour of the facility (which, to my chagrin, I realized I'd not visited in well over ten years - my, how it's grown!) and an excellent chat with Wilbur when, lo!, we're led back to the boardroom and find it converted into a networked training centre with eight RCMRD staff there raring to go for a re-run of last week's hands-on. And, of course, John and I are caught completely flat-footed. I hadn't actually caught Wilbur's intent, and neither John nor I were in the mental zone for a stand-up training session.

Nonetheless, into the fray, and this time in less than three hours we had the workers installed with their open standards server toolkit running and VERY beautifully accessing and combining geo-data from their different servers. A nice test of resiliency, if you ask me. Not least of all, Daniel's resiliency in very competently taking on the training role and supporting his colleagues with the skills he picked up last week. I love viral learning.

Most importantly, however, is that here is a technical institution whose very mandate requires servicing to governments on complex geo-data and remote sensing issues, and that has a truly unique business value to offer to SDI-EA. Most significant to me, thought, is that RCMRD is a training centre par excellence and today presents the prospect that, hey, my 'train-the-trainer' fixation arising from last Thursday's effort might already have at least one natural home.

To whit, UNEP, in a capacity building and tech transfer mode expends time and effort (but damn little money) to get RCMRD staff sufficiently up to speed where they can effectively render John and me jobless, at least in this outreach department. RCMRD get a marketable addition to their training portfolio, one that they can specifically target to the functionaries of the Government of Kenya, the IGOs and NGOs in Nairobi and their constituent members ates, some of whom at least are considering national SDI efforts. Meanwhile, UNEP and DEPHA and FAO and RCMRD (and interested others) work up some specific interoperability testbeds in the local environment and commit to keep these running for the next 2-3 years. As Kenya's national and international comms infrastructure is fibred and brought up to capacity they collectively provide a standard framework in which to measure responsiveness, utility, stability and the likes. Oh, what fun, methinks.

SDI-EA First Handzon Training Changes Life as we Know It

Thursday last week saw twenty eager trainees from 10 Nairobi-based institutions (see list at the end) got their first taste on-line data publishing. In a three-and-a-half hour session they went from a clean slate to having installed the necessary services and data management tools for implementing open web services for geo-data delivery based on OGC specifications.

The training session, in true SDI-EA fashion, was a no-cost no-fuss joint effort by UNEP/DEWA and FAO/SWALIM. We cobbled together a local network, participants showed up with their own laptops, and mwalimu John Mugwe got them underway installing postgreSQL with postGIS as their spatial database, plus geoserver as their web feature service. In many cases trainees also had their first taste of implementing Java and the Tomcat servlet container. Participants also learned how to take their own geospatial data (shapefiles) and ingest them into the database, and saw for themselves the utility of open-source GIS applications like qGIS and uDIG.

All this novelty notwithstanding, and despite having to deal with trojan-infected PCs and confusion caused by previous unclean installations of some of the software, by the end of the session every single system was up and running and participants were accessing each others data across the network and integrating them in their local client. Yes, they had the beginnings of a microcosm of an SDI running then and there. Now, if only the Nairobi internet becomes ready for prime time then we'll really have something to show.

And quite an eye-opener it was for them. I am sure that if we'd offered to keep the training sesion going that these eager beavers would have kept hacking away all afternoon. As it is we'll just have to see when and where else we can host these and follow-up sessions. I am keen to do at least one out here at the UN for other colleagues in Habitat, UNESCO and Unicef, but there's an obvious need for more sessions in more accessible places. There's also the need to follow-up incorporating the Geonetwork Opensource kit, which some local centres are already running but could use further promotion to help get over the metadata authoring hurdle. Perhaps the RCMRD or Survey of Kenya could be coaxed into hosting (the context of KNSDI development rings loudly here), or maybe we get the CGIAR institutions to engage with some local players. However we do it's obvious that John and I can't do all this in our spare time and, invoking our Teflon Approach, look for ways to pass on the Bright Torch of Training to others. Hmmm, I wonder if UNEP's own Capacity Building programme would give us a hand there?

The participating agencies were: African Rescue Committee AFREC http://www.afrec.org/ Data Excahange Platform for the Horn of Africa DEPHA http://www.depha.org Regional Centre for Mapping Resources for Development RCMRD http://www.rcmrd.org/ Somali Support Secretariat CEFA http://www.somalisupportsecretariat.info/ UN FAO Food Security Analysis Unit FAO-FSAU http://www.fsausomali.org UN FA Somalia water and land Information Management FAO-SWALIM www.faoswalim.org/ UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs OCHA Regional http://ochaonline.un.org/ UNEP/DEWA http://www.unep.org/dewa UN-Habitat http://www.un-habitat.org UN High Commissioner for Refugees UNHCR-Somalia http://www.unhcr.org/country/som.html

There's an SDI-EA training ulumnis' mailing list at sdi-ea-hackers@als.unep.org

Kenyan SDI Development on Steroids

Wednesday of this week brought a refreshing surprise. The secretariat of the Kenyan National SDI (http://www.knsdi.go.ke) held a one-day seminar to review the current draft standards, to which I was invited. I will admit that, as an observer of the KNSDI process for nearly five years now, I was not anticipating that much real progress would have been made. Boy, was I ever wrong!.

Two important factors had completely slipped under my radar. The first was the fact that the Kenyan Bureau of Standards (http://www.kebs.org/) has adopted 13 of the ISO 19100 draft international standards as Kenyan national standards. The second was the fact that the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (www.jica.go.jp/english/) has had a team working here for over a year on a joint project with Survey of Kenya and others. They're taking the 13 standards and, based on the experience gained in developing Japan's own SDI, are coming up with profiles, procedures and practices for putting five of those standards (six if count the ISO 19101 reference model) into operational practice. This is great! In a matter of months they have jump-started the whole Keyan SDI effort, getting past many of the institutional roadblocks that impede progress elsewhere. Yes, this is a first cut and no doubt the current drafts will need modification, or more elements added, as experience is gained. But at least there is now a basis for gaining that experience, such as SoKs campaign to vectorize over 900 topological map sheets at 1:50,000 scale, with all geo-processing, quality assurance and metadata development taking place within the framework of these standards. I look forward to aligning the UN's own SDI development (http://www.ungiwg.org/unsdi) and the efforts of SDI-EA to this fabulous work and to further, real progress in the near future.

Political Will

My partner Sabrina works for UNEP's water quality assessment programme, GEMS/water (http://www.gemswater.org). Somehow, last night, out beside our campfire in the backyard, we got onto data sharing (yes, we were being that romantic in the firelight) and she told me tow stories that really shook my tendency to stare myopically at technical issues and forget about the institutional and the psychological.

Both stories hinge around the GEMstat database (http://www.gemstat.org), a global repository which relies on countries sending in their water quality measurement data. Getting these data can, in some cases and despite having agreements in place, be a trial in patience with unaccountable delays and excuses. In other cases....

Sri Lanka, two weeks after the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004, delivers 4 years worth of data. Last week, on the same day that a suicide bombing kills 29 in Baghdad, the Iraqi focal point delivers his country's first block of data to GEMStat. "How", one wonders, "can people bother with silly data delivery when really terrible things are happening around them?" and this brings us to Sam's point in these stories - political will.

Examples like these two might be more extreme than most of use would ever wish to deal with but, by and large, the impediments that we perceive as preventing or constraining data and information exchange - whether technical or institutional - can be overcome give sufficient political will. Conversely, all the technology and memoranda in the world are useless if not backed up by such will. I found here tales to be a salutary reminder that, too often, we really do tend to focus on the wrong parts of these problems.

Anyway, more tomorrow about recent exciting developments in the Kenyan National SDI (http ://www.kndsi.go.ke) effort, and the fun and games today of our first hands-on technical training session on open web services.

Acronym smashup - UN meets CG for SDI Q&A

John and I were this week invited to lend an SDI hand to two important institutions here in Nairobi, namely the International Livestock Research Institute (http://www.ilri.org/) and the World Agroforestry Centre a.k.a. ICRAF) (http://www.worldagroforestrycentre.org/). ILRI and ICRAF are two of the 15 international agricultural research centers supported by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (http://www.cgiar.org/). These are independent institutions, each with its own charter, international board of trustees, director general, and staff, but do share common requirements.

Spatial data sharing is one of these and their Consortium for Spatial Information (http://csi.cgiar.org/index.asp) is a strong advocate of all things SDI-ish. Over recent years there has been a strong push, for example, to get all the CG centres writing and using ISO 19115 standard metadata, for which they've been developing and promoting the Geonetwork opensource toolkit (which just happens to be another jointed-up effort led by FAO and WFP with UNEP and OCHA as more recent recruits).

Anyway, the CSI now has a regular scheduled hierarchical harvesting of metadata across the CG network and available as a consolidated view at their geonetwork site http://geonetwork.csi.cgiar.org/ . What John and I were to help them with was getting started with the next step - publishing their data to the net. The two institutions need to move data between themselves anyway and the idea of doing this using open web services is not only an appealing way to go but is also a move that will position ILRI and ICRAF as their community inevitably moves build this capability in years to come.

Needless to say the CG as a whole is an important partner to the UN. FAO obviously has strong alignment with their agricultural focus but a surprising number of other UN bodies also share common interests. UNEP, for example, is co-sponsor with ICRAF of the Billion Tree Campaign (http://www.worldagroforestrycentre.org/billiontreecampaign or http://www.unep.org/billiontreecampaign). The idea of interoperating between the CG and UN networks is an exciting and potentially important one that seems worth investing considerable effort to pursue.

These are early days yet - the Nairobi centres have strong GIS capacity but neither of them even have a local web presence. We have a long way to go before we can point with pride at all the marvelous interoperation within and between the CG, the UN presence in the region and our respective communities. Raising awareness with management while mollifying the concerns of network administrators is going to take time and understanding, and demands that we look for a nice incremental approach that takes small steps and demonstrates success every step of the way. I wonder how we'll do it.

Meanwhile, of course, there were the inevitable glitches that confounded Wednesday's - in this case a lot of it seemed to be because we were installing geoserver etc. on a laptop that was already being hacked to an installation of ESRI's portal toolkit - the Tomcat and java installations had already been "fiddled with" and were not the nice clean environment we assumed. Lot's of time spent trouble-shooting but, in the end, considerable success, an enthusiastic audience, and lots of practical experiences and tips to write up in our SDI installation cookbook - whenever we get around to writing it.

A real "One UN" opportunity?

Two of the goals stated early on for SDI-EA were getting the UN better able to deliver better member States by boosting their national SDI efforts, and getting at least bits of the UN working better by boosting interoperability amongst agencies as some sort of practical aspect of the UN reform and delivering as One UN. There now maybe cause for think that some of this might actually happen.

On Tuesday this week I had an unplanned but very illuminating meeting with Mr. Georges Tadonki, the senior regional information management advisor with SAHIMS (http://www.sahims.net/), the Southern African Human-development Information Management Network for Coordinated Humanitarian & Development Action - rather a lot to squeeze onto a business card but nonetheless important. SAHIM is in many respects the southern African equivalent of DEPHA (www.depha.org), the Data Exchange Platform for the Horn of Africa, the inter-agency group with whom UNEP is working closely as we try to roll out SDI in East Africa.

Georges has been engaged by the UN Resident Coordinator in Kenya to assist with the development of a Kenyan Humanitarian Information Management System (KHIM), reviewing the available information management platforms and assessing their contributions to humanitarian information management. He is also to analyze opportunities and challenges of creating some sort of central information repository, and to conduct a training workshop with IMOs from both humanitarian and development agencies, including the Government of Kenya and key donors, to build consensus on a shared platform and design a way forward for the country team.

A number of resonant chords were struck here: the potential institutional line-ups between this humanitarian sector task and the development of more general Kenyan SDI; the overlap with the OCHA Regional Offices interests in both SDI and humanitarian information development; the fact that SDI-EA has already had some engagement with ICRC and (as of last week) has also been approached by International Rescue; plus of course UNEP's focus on climate change adaptation strategies and its impacts on humanitarian issues. Interestingly enough, after Georges had introduced SAHIM and the KHIM, I gave him standard spiel #27 about UNSDI, engagement with national SDIs, open standards, distributed systems and so on, and explaining the SDI-EA effort while drawing my usual back-of-the-napkin cluster diagram when, lo!, Georges flipped back through his notes and showed us virtually the same diagram he'd sketched in a meeting the previous morning. Ahhh, convergent thinking.

Anyway, at this stage it suggests and important and powerful opportunity to align this ad hoc SDI-EA activity with some real, official UN country team activities targeting a specific community with (presumably - I'm no specialist) well-articulated needs. Now all we have to do is get the Resident Coordinator to start thinking less in terms of "central information repository" and more about distributed and custodial but integrated services. I think that's part of Georges' job.

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.