UnitedNations Committee

Background
The OSGeo Board of Directors met with the UN GIS team at FOSS4G in Seoul, Korea in September 2015. The UN GIS team is very interested in having OSGeo "at the table", and is interested in an exchange of official letters (an MoU would take many years to pass through on their side apparently) to formalize the relationship. Mr. Kyoung-Soo Eom, chief of the UN Geospatial Information Section, has invited OSGeo to be part of a working group on Geospatial Information and Services for Disasters.

Goals

 * Develop a closer relationship with the UN.


 * Establish a formal agreement between OSGeo and the UN.


 * Establish communication between the UN GIS team and the OSGeo community.


 * Promote the use of Open Source geospatial tools by the UN's member states and committees.

Communication

 * a new "UN" mailing list will be created (see ticket)

Activities

 * OSGeo has formally expressed interest in joining the UN-GGIM-Working-Group on Geospatial Information and Services for Disasters
 * this was discussed at OSGeo's Board_Meeting_2015-10-15
 * the UN is looking for feedback on the working group's TOR draft

Next steps

 * put out call for members for this new committee to Discuss list
 * organize a monthly meeting, possibly using IRC or Slack
 * draft official letter for formalizing relationship with UN

Members

 * Jeff McKenna
 * Jochen Albrecht
 * Bob Basques
 * Massimiliano_Cannata
 * Jeroen Ticheler
 * Micha Silver
 * Godwin Yeboah
 * Yewondwossen Assefa
 * Nikos Alexandris
 * Andrew Turner
 * Venkatesh Raghavan
 * add your name