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.