[SDI-Africa] Fw: [Sdi-ea] [SDI East Africa] Whoops! Unanticipated Blessings Upon SDI-EA

Fri Jul 13 06:32:12 EDT 2007

Mick Wilson
Division of Early Warning and Assessment (DEWA)
United Nations Environment Programme
PO Box 30552 -  Nairobi 00100, Kenya
Tel: +254 20 7623436
Fax: +254 20 7624315
Email: mick.wilson at unep.org
Web www.unep.net, www.unep.org

----- Forwarded by Mick Wilson/UNEP/NBO/UNO on 13/07/2007 01:31 PM -----

             Mick Wilson                                                   
             <MickWilson20 at gma                                             
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                                                                   Subject 
                                       [Sdi-ea] [SDI East Africa] Whoops!  
             13/07/2007 01:12          Unanticipated Blessings Upon        
             PM                        SDI-EA                              

One of the participants in last Thursday's hands-on training was Daniel
Olilo from the regional remote sensing centre here in Nairobi, the Regional
Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD http://www.rcmrd.org
). RCMRD's constituency is member states from Djibouti to Zambia and a
bunch of affiliates - in other words they cover the are very much of
interest to SDI-EA AND they have the ear of their governments.

[IMAGE]Anyway, Daniel went enthusiastically and enlightenedly back to work
and, on Monday, pitches the whole open-standards publishing-to-the-web
thing to his director, Wilbur Ottichelo, a man I've known and worked with
for over 15 years. Wilbur calls me on Tuesday looking for a meeting and a
chance to follow up on this tech support question. I say "yeah, sure" -
we've been hoping for months to get RCMRD on board SDI-EA for all sorts of
reasons: a centre of technical expertise, a long history of collaboration
with UNEP and FAO, close engagement with the Kenyan national SDI effort,
and so on and so on. A natural partnership, even stronger with their
establishment of a Geonetwork Opensource node (
http://www.rcmrd.org/geonetwork/) already publishing ISO 19115 metadata to
the web. Wilbur and I agree that John and I will pop over Thursday
afternoon which, by pure happenstance, will follow my director's
meet-and-greet with Wilbur that morning.

[IMAGE]So, off we go, have a quickie guided tour of the facility (which, to
my chagrin, I realized I'd not visited in well over ten years - my, how
it's grown!) and an excellent chat with Wilbur when, lo!, we're led back to
the boardroom and find it converted into a networked training centre with
eight RCMRD staff there raring to go for a re-run of last week's hands-on.
And, of course, John and I are caught completely flat-footed. I hadn't
actually caught Wilbur's intent, and neither John nor I were in the mental
zone for a stand-up training session.

Nonetheless, into the fray, and this time in less than three hours we had
the workers installed with their open standards server toolkit running and
VERY beautifully accessing and combining geo-data from their different
servers. A nice test of resiliency, if you ask me. Not least of all,
Daniel's resiliency in very competently taking on the training role and
supporting his colleagues with the skills he picked up last week. I love
viral learning.

Most importantly, however, is that here is a technical institution whose
very mandate requires servicing to governments on complex geo-data and
remote sensing issues, and that has a truly unique business value to offer
to SDI-EA. Most significant to me, thought, is that RCMRD is a training
centre par excellence and today presents the prospect that, hey, my
'train-the-trainer' fixation arising from last Thursday's effort might
already have at least one natural home.

To whit, UNEP, in a capacity building and tech transfer mode expends time
and effort (but damn little money) to get RCMRD staff sufficiently up to
speed where they can effectively render John and me jobless, at least in
this outreach department. RCMRD get a marketable addition to their training
portfolio, one that they can specifically target to the functionaries of
the Government of Kenya, the IGOs and NGOs in Nairobi andtheir constituent
members ates, some of whom at least are considering national SDI efforts.
Meanwhile, UNEP and DEPHA and FAO and RCMRD (and interested others) work up
some specific interoperability testbeds in the local environment andcommit
to keep  these running for the next 2-3 years. As Kenya's national and
international comms infrastructure is fibred and brought up to capacity
they collectively provide a standard framework in which to measure
responsiveness, utility, stability and the likes. Oh, what fun, methinks.

--
Posted By  Mick Wilson  to   SDI East Africa   on  7/13/2007 12:47:00 PM
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