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 has been created, please subscribe at https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/un

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

Meetings

Next meeting: 2015-11-17 @16:00 UTC (1 hour in length)
- IRC-channel: #osgeo channel on freenode.net
- how to connect: choose your favorite IRC client, or go directly through browser with webchat
- Agenda:
  - discuss structure of committee (chair, frequency of meetings)
  - discuss goals of committee
  - next steps
  - please add your items here

Members

Pierre Béland

add your name