FOSS4G for RUFORUM

RUFORUM-Open Source Geospatial Foundation =

Webinar Series on Open Geospatial Resources for graduate students and researchers Date starting July 2020 (one webinar each month)

Introduction

The Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM) and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) have partnered to organise a joint Webinar series on Open Geospatial Software for agriculture and environment research and studies.

RUFORUM is a network of 126 universities in 38 African countries mobilising african universities to contribute community and national development. RUFORUM’s mission is to strengthen the capacities of universities to foster innovations responsive to demands of small-holder farmers through the training of high quality researchers, the output of impact-oriented research and the maintenance of collaborative working relations among researchers, farmers, national agricultural research institutions and governments. RUFORUM’s Strategic Objectives are; Building synergy from networks of specialization to develop quality human resources and capacity required to intensify and increase Africa’s agricultural productivity and competitiveness Ensuring the products, processes and knowledge developed through university research directly respond to and are used by value chain actors in the agri-food system to catalyse transformation; and, Marshalling resources and strategically allocating them to enable African universities to transform into viable institutional entities responsive to national aspirations and conditions through intensive knowledge-sharing and collective action. OSGeo is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to foster global adoption of open geospatial technology by being an inclusive software foundation devoted to an open philosophy and participatory community driven development. The foundation provides financial, organizational and legal support to the broader open source geospatial community. OSGeo was founded in 2006 with Vision of empowering everyone with open source geospatial knowledge and is now well established as a global organization with Local Chapters all over the world. OSGeo represents and supports more than 25 software projects like QGIS, PostGIS or GDAL. To broaden its reach across the globe, OSGeo organizes many events (https://www.osgeo.org/events/).

To make geospatial education and opportunities accessible to all, OSGeo established the GeoForAll Initiative to reach out to education institutions using the OSGeoLive toolkit. The OSGeolive toolkit is a self-contained bootable DVD, USB thumb drive or Virtual Machine based on Lubuntu, that allows you to try a wide variety of open source geospatial software without installing anything. It is composed entirely of free software, allowing it to be freely distributed, duplicated and passed around. It provides pre-configured applications for a range of geospatial use cases, including storage, publishing, viewing , analysis and manipulation of data. It also contains sample datasets and documentation. OSGeoLive is an OSGeo project used in several workshops at FOSS4Gs around the world.

RUFORUM and OSGeo through the OSGeo GeoForAll initiative have organised a Webinar series to popularise and offer generic training on how to use Geospatial Software developed by OSGeo Foundation for graduate students and faculty of universities in Africa working in Agriculture, environment and related sciences.

The objective of the training is to focus on each broad level topic as below (advise on what is feasible in 2 hours for students and faculty

Topics

Topics to be covered in the Webinar series (topics)

OSGeoLive and DesktopGIS Introduction with QGIS
OSGeoLive and Webservices Introduction with Geoserver
OSGeoLive and Datastores Introduction with PostGIS
OSGeoLive and Navigation and Maps introduction with OpenStreetMap
OSGeoLive and Spatial Tools introduction with R
OSGeoLive and Geospatial Libraries Introduction with GDAL/OGR
OSGeoLive and Geospatial Standards Introduction with OGC
OSGeoLive and Browser Facing GIS Introduction with Leaflet

Resource persons

Astrid Emde
Rafael Moreno (webinars platform and recording).

Where

Zoom. Registration details will be provided.

Participants

Masters and PhD students and faculty of universities across Africa
Zoom registration details (to be provided by OSGeo team after we agree on the date

Schedule

to be discussed
Start 03/202021
monthly
what day would be good
time?

USBs

OSGeoLive Version 14
discuss needs

ToDos

Create an Events page
Add to resources
Promote on Twitter / social media / students-channels
...