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

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.

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?

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.