Live SDI

These are the final recommendations from consultation amongst East African geo-information users regarding the governance structure of any proposed UN SDI. There is a low-resolution version for speedy download and a larger, high-resolution ready-to-print version. A wiki version will also be done some day.

Thanks go to Audrey Ringler for laying this out so nicely, and to all of you who provided insightful editorial advice.

Following "Better Data Sooner" a group of participants put into action a quick SDI showcase for the UNGIWG meeting that was to be held the following month in Bangkok. The following KML was their first effort.

PDFs of slides presented during the consultation. The two-digit number refers to the session in which the presentation was made.

Most appendices contain the lists collected at the end of each Breakout Group (BOG)

(Facilitator Mick Wilson UNEP/DEWA).

Discussion points are in Appendix 6

If the UN agencies do not provide leadership then each of the actions suggested will need to be undertaken separately by all the target participants, and others. The benefits afforded not just by the SDI per se but by the philosophies which it embodies are needed to assist in building the geospatial component of national and regional infrastructures, as

Use country, regional and international experience to facilitate and expedite the implementation of an East African SDI, initially under the auspices of UNEP, to be transitioned to regional bodies within a defined period:

• have the implementation as a test bed to demonstrate to decision and policy makers that this is real and that the benefits can be shown – irrespective (at this stage) of the quality and/or completeness of the information available

The introduction to the role of the UN emphasised that this should not be approached from the perspective that the UN itself is a source of funding – no false impressions/hopes were to be raised in this regard. See Appendix 7 for lists

SDIs provide nodes which are the responsibility of national governments and special interest groups wishing/needing to communicate with others. Reducing

(Craig von Hagen FAO/SWALIM)

This presentation provided a consideration of the similarity in the requirements for a wide range of existing projects. A number of significant innovations were described to reduce the cost, dependency on the number of technical staff, the practicality of remote monitoring stations and means of communicating the outcomes of baseline studies, analysis of trends and limited predictions using the internet even with the low bandwidth that is available. Ways of using the rapidly

Most groups decided to outline the information which they create and identify those which are published. Full lists are included in Appendix 4 – it should be noted that these are indicative and not necessarily comprehensive.

Discussions which lead up to the scenario suggestions highlighted the level of isolation of each of the organisations and the importance of informal networks of individuals that find out who has what data, get