Realizing a Dream: Introducing AGCommons Director Laban MacOpiyo

There are many reasons why we choose to follow a particular career path. Sometimes it is a childhood dream that takes shape watching a movie or reading a favorite book; sometimes a spark is ignited in a school classroom; sometimes it is a desire to make a difference in a community; sometimes we adopt someone else’s dream and make it our own.

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The Elusive SMS Interface

When you spend time in Africa you realize immediately that the use mobile phones for SMS is huge. In the big cities just about everyone has a phone. Even in rural areas, most farmers use mobile phones regularly. Applications such as FrontlineSMS and RapidSMS have made it relatively easy for NGOs and others working in Africa to setup and deploy SMS broadcast to provide a variety of services.

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An Unconventional Approach to Integration

The AGCommons geospatial platform needs to support a wide variety of users and a large number of different scenarios in order to be successful.

From a design perspective, the ideal platform solution must be:

♦ Unbiased in terms of software tools and platforms.
♦ Based on standards to enable maximum interoperability.
♦ Driven by user needs and be user oriented.

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Redistributing the AGCommons Technical Platform

One of the technical goals of the AGCommons project has been to design the platform in such a way that it could be taken off-line and widely distributed at little or no cost. This results from direct feedback that we heard from African users during the outreach trips. We found that most potential users in Africa had no experience with desktop GIS, little or no access to geographic data and slow or expensive Internet connections that make on-line delivery impractical.

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