On the first day (Tuesday 8th June 2010) of the 2nd Africa Agriculture Geospatial Week, the afternoon was devoted to looking at the AgCommons project and the launching of its new platform.
An introduction to AgCommons was given by Enrica Porcari, Chief Information Officer of the CGIAR, and Laban MacOpiyo, Director of AgCommons, which provided a background to the program and what services it offers.
One of the key highlights of AgCommons is the set of quick-win projects (those bolded were presented):
•Nodes of growth: Improving legume seed networks in Kenya (Andy Farrow, CIAT Africa)
•Roads Data Development in Ethiopia
•Community Level Crop Disease Surveillance (Hein Bouwmeester, IITA)
•Africa Trial Sites Catalogue: Reaching out to farmers, agronomists and plant breeders with spatially efficient, participatory testing networks (Kai Sonders, CIMMYT)
Some interesting questions and discussion points that came up from the workshop participants with respect to the Quick-win projects were as follows:
- What is the value addition of AgCommons? of such methods?
- How do you ensure the quality of the data that is provided to farmers (and others)?
- Would be good to collaborate with other NGOs, private sector and even other sectors (e.g Public health sector) which may be using innovate methods for collecting, sharing and translating data.
A presentation was also made by Mandhi Sehmi on KenCall, a partner to AgCommons which has developed a farmer helpline.
In order to improve AgCommons and improve collaboration, an interactive discussion session with the workshop participants was facilitated by Laban MacOpiyo to explore the following questions:
- What do you think of the concept of AgCommons?
- What gaps are there? What can be done to improve the concept and operationalisation of it?
- What could/should people and/or organisations benefit from AgCommons?
- What could/should people and/or organisations contribute to AgCommons?
Some of the comments and suggestions made included:
- AgCommons should be developed as a form of extension
- Needs to cover wide range of data which can help to support increased production, better understanding of markets, crop information as well as livestock information.
- AgCommons should help to address key issues e.g climate change
- AgCommons is necessary as a global approach which brings in the participation of farmers
- This concept can be used to appeal to policy makers and processes
- Need to think about how information is packaged
- While the commons is a good concept-would also be good to think about which information and products people would/could pay for.
At the end of the session Laban MacOpiyo showcased and launched the new AgCommons platform. The platform:
provides key elements for geospatial information discovery and accessibility: a comprehensive metadata catalog supporting robust search for geospatial data; an overlay library providing a data gallery for previewing contents of the AGCommons database; and the SMS query interface for access to the data via mobile phone.
Laban highlighted the three main components of the platform:
- Data Search
- Data Gallery
- SMS Query Tool
