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". 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 to support the UN migration to Open Source Geospatial software solutions.

UN Open GIS initiative

"... it is to identify and develop an Open Source GIS bundle that meets the requirements of UN operations, taking full advantage of the expertise of mission partners (partner nations, technology contributing countries, international organizations, academia, NGO’s, private sector). The strategic approach shall be developed with best and shared principles, standards and ownership, in a prioritized manner that addresses capability gaps and needs without duplicating efforts of other Member States or entities. The UN OpenGIS Initiative strategy shall collaboratively and cooperatively develop, validate, assess, migrate, and implement sound technical capabilities with all the appropriate documentation and training that in the end provides a united effort to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of utilizing Open Source GIS around the world."

Goals

Support the UN's member states and committees through:
- OSGeo's service providers
- the GeoForAll network
Emphasize to the UN and its members the benefits of the stable OSGeo stack of projects
Establish communication between the UN-GIS team and the OSGeo community.
Foster the outreach activities of OSGeo

Communication

a new "UN" mailing list has been created, please subscribe at https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/un and add your name to the list of this committee members at the end of this page.

Activities

October 2015

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

March 2016

OSGeo participated to a UNopenGIS initiative (Brindisi, Italy, 5-10th March 2016) meeting and where formally incorporated in the UN Open GIS initiative as member of the initiative technical committee.
Call for "UN Training Material". The Material available here: https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/UNTraining

April 2016

Birth of "Spiral 2: Capacity Building" Working Group under the direction of Maria Antonia Brovelli (OSGeo), Diego Gonzales Ferreiro (UN) and Juan Curtado (US South Command).
Decision (taking into account UN exigencies) to start the training with QGIS, PostGIS, Geonode, Geoserver, OpenLayers
Call for volunteers within GeoForAll for revising available tutorials related to QGIS, PostGIS, GeoNode, Geoserver, OpenLayers

May - June - July 2016

Revision and discussions about QGIS, PostGIS and GeoNode tutorials. People contributing: Alberta Albertella, Gregory Giuliani,Scott Hatcher,Ivana Ivanova,Thomas Mueller, Rick Smith, Mike Pumphrey, Vivien Deparday, Ariel Núñez ,Paolo Corti,Francesco Stompanato, Dimitris Karakostis, Dilek Emanetoglu, Arun Kumar Muthusamy, Andres Felipe Poveda Sanchez, Stanly Shaji

August 2016

UNopenGIS governance has been defined and OSGeo has been incorporated in it (Massimiliano Cannata and Maria Brovelli are member of the Strategic Board) and more OSGeo members is going to be incorporated in other governing committees.
A logo contest has been set up and run by OSGeo to brand the initiative (see UN_OpenGIS_logo_contest)

September 2016

The 19th September 2016 the first UN virtual class of Spiral 2 will start their activity with GeoAcademy QGIS.The virtual class will work using the Beep Platform of Politecnico di Milano, as teaching platform. Tutors of this first course will be:

Thomas Mueller, Rick Smith and Youngok Kang. Alberta Albertella will help in accessing and using the platform (for sharing material, upload files, homework, webconference, blog, etc)

Four editions of this course will be issued for a total of 72 GIS experts of Operational Field (Peacekeeping Actions) of UN. The courses will be: 19 September - 18 October 2016 19 October - 18 November 2016 19 November - 19 December 2016 9 January - 8 February 2017

Volunteers who will be involved are: Thomas Mueller, Rick Smith, Youngok Kang, Lene Fischer and Kurt Menke. Volunteers who will be activated if needed: Darshana Rawal, Ivana Ivanova, Adeymo Ayodele Oba

November 2016

Second UN openGIS initiative workshops will be held in Seoul 7-11 November

Committee Meetings

Next meeting

planned for November 2016, date and time to be decided

Previous meetings

UN Meeting 2015-11-17 16.00 UTC