The meeting of very “spatial” people kicked off today in Nairobi with the Consortium for Spatial Information (CSI) 2009 Annual Meeting.
With the theme “Mapping our Future 2009-2014: Collective Action and Advocacy to Improve Spatial Solutions for Sustainable Development”, participants both from within CSI community and beyond, including a broad representation of the AGCommons team, gathered today (Tuesday) at ILRI Headquarters in Nairobi.
Today’s agenda was “CSI Business Day” so discussion focused on internal CSI matters, but AGCommons has been an important topic throughout the day.
John McDermott from ILRI in his welcome address, invited participants to focus on the key feature of the meeting: greater orientation of research in serving development needs and defined AGCommons as a great opportunity for CSI to raise the bar. Use this week to think of how to better coordinating: the challenge is to accellerate the process.
Bashir Jama, Director of Soil Health of AGRA in his opening address urged CSI and AGCommons to be “bold and pragmatic” in their deliberations, as their partnership is of great value to strengthening the capacity of GIS technology of national institutions.
“What do you expect out of this meeting?”
This question was posed to participants to establish a common ground and to help focus the discussion. Responses were categorized into “will achieve”, “might achieve” and “will not achieve”. The good news: no expectations fell into the “will not achieve” category.
Responses in the “will achieve” included:
* Understand what other people are doing
* CSI role and how CSI centers will work in the future
* Strategy: opportunity to brainstorm on how to link to bigger CG activities
* Better understaniding CSI-AGCommons and how to find common areas of cooperation
…and “might achieve” (but very likely be achieved):
* New agreements between ESRI and CSI
* Increase communications within CSI members
* Gain better knowledge of GIS needs
* Learn country-level outreach experience and successes
“We can’t leave the room without these being done”, said Stanley Wood, CSI Coordinator:
•4-5 Potential AGCommons Phase II Project Concept Outlines
•Established process for follow-up and engagement between CSI members and AGCommons implementation teams for further development of these proposals
•Action Plan for the CSI Coordinator and members for the 2009-2010 period
•An updated, focused and enthused CSI membership
The agenda today focused on CSI’s thematic areas and 6 topics were identified and discussed in a “World Cafè” session facilitated by Nadia Manning-Thomas from IWMI:
1. delivery platform for partners
How can CSI deliver spatial data and analytical tools to in ways that make them accessible and usable at very low|no cost (and in ways that do not rely on internet access)?
2. revitalizing outreach and engagement
CSI can point to great success in terms of relevance and influence of its work. But more and needs to be done to reach out and engage with our partners and clients. And needs to be done urgently. How do we set about this? What are the next steps?
3. core data and tool priorities
At the outset of this meeting it is useful to take stock of latest views on these priorities, especially in the light of developments over the past year
4. Atlas product
The AGCommons QuickWin process threw up a number of proposals around the notion of an “African Agricultural Development Atlas”. These ideas might be worth resolving and building upon. But clarity on the scope and purpose of these products is required.
5. CG Mega Programs geospatial “plag&p(l)ay” services
What specific goods and services the CGIAR geospatial community can package up ready to market as service modules to any/all Mega Programs.
6. enhancing the contribution of the geospatial sector to agricultural development
CSI has focused on scientist-to-scientist data and knowledge exchange. For a range of strategic and professional reasons we could be doing more as advocates and activists in enhancing the the contribution of the Geospatial Sector (research, development, application, support, outreach, capacity building) to accelerating hunger and poverty reduction.
Outputs of World Cafè will be put together in a list of concrete actions later this week.
To the question: “How does CSI fit in AGCommons?” Stan helped clarify with this diagram:
After lunch, and after an energizing “mingle-mingle” session we were ready to learn about software vendors agreement status and opportunities:
Caramelle Terborgh from ESRI presented some of the innovative services and products ESRI offers, and walked the CSI members through a detailed analysis of what the long-standing agreement between CGIAR centers and ESRI has to offer. A feature article on this partnership will be published soon.
Tomorrow will be “CSI Information sharing day”: stay tuned…
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