Gi4DM Panel 3: Education for GeoDM
Mansourian, Ali
Ivanova, Ivana
Mapanauta, Miriam
More Links: www.hotosm.org www.geochicasosm.org (also we have a Youtube channel) www.up42.com
 Good morning, good afternoon everyone, and very welcome to this panel. I'm Maria Bravelli from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and I'm very happy of being here with you for presenting a very, very important topic. When we are discussing about geospatial data management, we can't avoid speaking, discussing, concentrating, focusing also on education. Education is really the fundamental point, helping girls in aiding citizens, students or citizens that are aware with respect to what is happening around, and which are well prepared in facing the situations. Okay, so today we are here with three very important people who are involved in very huge and important projects, so I'm very happy of introducing to you the three guests of today. We have Dr. Ivana Ivanova who works as a special science senior lecturer at the School of Earth and Planetary Science of the Curtin University and Frontier SIO research fellow in special information infrastructures. Ivana research interests and expertise are in special data quality, provenance of special resources and special knowledge infrastructures. She's actively involved in national and international standardization at the ISO and OGC and she collaborates with UNGJM academic network and with the UN Open GIS initiative. Our second guest is Miriam Gonzalez. She's co-founder of GRCIC initiative where she promotes more women participation and knowledge sharing in just special spaces. She has collaborated in projects based on mobile application, location intelligence and the most recently in Earth observations and currently she is doing partnership at the Upp32 and Iobas subsidiary which aims to democratize data accessibility from space and geospatial industries and supporting companies to derive insight to solve challenges on the Earth. For the past years Miriam has been involved in mapping, promoting OpenStreetMap and when it opens the map by giving workshops, conferences and coordinating efforts among open data key players. Then we have Ali Alimansuya, Dr. Ali Mansuya who is an associate professor in GIS at the Lund University in Sweden. He is a council member of GIL which is one of the largest GIS associations in Europe. Ali is coordinator of several European funded projects with international consortiums focusing on research and capacity building on GIS for disaster management in Europe, Central Asia, Africa and Middle East. His main research interests are open data infrastructure and special temporal modeling and analysis using artificial intelligence. So you see our experts are our guests in the fee but we want to focus on. So very welcome to Ivana, Miriam and Ali as well. So good morning and good afternoon also to you. As the time is very short I want to start immediately with our questions and specifically I want to start with Ivana. Ivana, I know that you are involved in projects with United Nations and specifically I want you to focus on your activities in the UNG special capacity building. Yes, thank you Maria. Thank you for the excellent introduction and inviting us, inviting me to this plenary discussion. You are right, very right. I'm right now and at this moment as we speak involved in a very important UN initiative and that's more specifically initiative of the Geospatial Division at the UN who is responsible in general for anything special that UN needs for any type of decision or product producing any type of output. So this division decided sometime in 2016 that they need to re-evaluate their approach and the use of the software suits for all their operations primarily those that are in most vulnerable areas such as the UN peacekeeping and peace building operations and they decided that it's time because of the open source geospatial software maturity it's time to have a look whether what they used so far should not be replaced with a bit more flexible and agile tools such as from the OS Geos suits, open source geospatial software suit and they have found it an initiative what is called now UN Open GIS initiative which looks at various aspects of using the geospatial software in UN operations. So there are five working groups focusing on areas such as spatial analysis, artificial intelligence, so finding the right tools for these types of activities but one of the most essential ones well at least I am convinced is the capacity building so it's working group two and capacity building theme or topic makes it as the well makes their objective is to make sure that when the right tools are picked people who need to operate them are knowledgeable and there are so there are several initiatives and courses and training sessions offered through this working group and I'm involved in one which is the training on using post GIS in GIS operations so essentially what we do is to offer training in introduction to post GIS at basic and advanced level at the same session and our students, our people from the UN operations team so far we have done something around 10 sessions also including with other other training so this other training is in QGIS and in these sessions we are talking about participants in dimensions of around 100 people so 100 staff. Now one of the interesting things is to mention the pass rate in these courses is not that high so it's around 50 percent but if we think about under the difficult conditions under which our students need to study and then this is actually quite good because many many times students in the middle of the course they are asked to relocate under fire essentially so under very dangerous conditions so they just can't afford to study next to their day operations so that's just the summary and if you are interested in some of the details we can talk further. Okay can you tell the people if there is a website and earlier that or what they have to do if they want to have more pieces of information? Yes there is a website and I'm not sure because I don't see a chat window do we have any? That probably is enough of writing, googling, UN Open GIS. Yes it's enough to google UN Open GIS so the website is UNOpenGIS altogether.org and from there all the information is available and the working group I mentioned was working group two on capacity building and I just want to add one thing so all material that is produced under UN Open GIS initiative is freely available to those that want to reuse this and the links are available from the website so I encourage people to check it out because a lot of useful stuff also for non-UN people. Fantastic thank you so much thank you so much and we go very quickly to Miriam. Miriam you have a lot of experience in training citizens also so not only students but citizens for humanitarian support can you tell us something about that? Yeah sure first I mean thanks also for the invitation to participate so I have been a volunteer and now I am a part of the board of directors in humanitarian Open Street Map and if some people don't know what Open Street Map is is the largest your special database open and crowdsourced so how you can train all these people who wants to volunteer and participate first of all I would say there are mainly three ways to map one way is remote mapping so there could be something happening in one side of the world and you can be in the other side of the world with a computer a satellite image and you can be drawing on top and the second will be in site in the one you can use maybe field papers in the ones you print what is the current situation of the map and you can be walking around adding data and the third one will be with applications such as street complete and GPS tracks and some other things so there are two ways I would say also training people who volunteer also for doing adding data to the maps we can organize map patterns we can organize also things with universities we can organize things also with governments in the ones we gather people in one room and we show them through some slides and some exercises how to add data to the maps so that's I think one thing the other one kind of more in the humanitarian NGO format is having these Slack channels in the ones people join the channels and then you can invite them to be part of some building capacity through some webinars or through some material already recorded so I think those are mainly the two ways I would say I miss so much doing the map patterns I tell you when how I started this mapping world was maybe five six years ago when I was in Mexico City and we started seeing how comparing the data of the maps in Mexico Latin America versus what was happening in Europe and we said I mean what's happening here I mean we are like maybe ten years behind so along with some other people in the mapping world which were mapping independently we said how can we share the knowledge we have about mapping with more people so we start knocking doors in universities and see how we can train some of the the their GIS areas or maybe your graphic faculties and I remember I mean one of the most excited events we we've trained into 80 people so in corona times that seems to be like another time in the space I miss that so much and I was discussing that with the trainers the other day in the ones all these people they were they could not believe how much impact they could do by learning how to do mapping through a website in also in humanitarian tools because we can say the humanitarian mapping has different responses one is for disaster response which is something is in crisis at this moment and we need to map really rapidly so you will be needing things to be done within 24 hours to 48 hours to be able to receive health that can be food it can be shelter it can be medicine so how can you provide this data almost in immediate response to be able to have Red Cross or some organizations to be able to support people who is suffering under specific time so that needs to be a really quick coordination and needs to be done within hours there is a more long-term goal for sustainable development I think running out of time so that can be done in a different pace but then people also can be doing mapping for future events that can happen so that's something else and also yeah where is which which is the website people who want to have more pieces of information yeah sure the website for a humanitarian open street map is hotosm.org and also people want to participate in the webinars or in more active participation they can go to the Slack channels and you have different Slack channels according to the things you want to participate okay and obviously they can contact you yeah for sure please mapanauta at gmail.com or twitter open for discussions and happy to help okay thank you so much thank you so much so we go now to we we want also to invite now Ali and I know that Ali is has a lot of experience in the projects related to developing countries so education in developing countries and therefore I want to ask in something more about specifically about the projects related to disaster management. Thank you Maria also I would like to thank you for inviting me into this panel like you said I'm coordinating several projects funded by EU and these projects are focusing on a capacity building in Central Asia, Middle East and Africa on using special technologies special data infrastructures for disaster management. These projects are being conducted by consortiums consisting of European universities and also universities from country partners. Based on the requirements analysis and observations that we have had from these developing countries in Africa Central Asia and the Middle East actually just in few countries you can find universities who are offering advanced high quality GI education for disaster management. In the rest of the countries unfortunately GIS education is still very basic and applications in disaster management has not been recognized so what we are doing in these countries are that we develop courses we design a curriculum and also we train trainees to be able to teach the developed courses so a problem that we found in these countries is that you don't you have lack of teachers who have required competences to be able to to teach advanced courses so we also focus on these aspects and besides that we are also developing easy to use tools a web-based the GIS tools to be used by a stack holders so they can you can disseminate the use of GI technology for disaster management not only at university level but also between in universities and what I see as a challenge actually in the future is that how these activities can remain sustainable after the lifetime of the project when the project is done when the budget is finished how these universities in developing countries they can continue the work actually teach the courses keep the courses updated etc etc and this is something that we are also discussing with European Commission that how it can continue in the future. Oh thank you thank you so much and I'm asking myself because you have so so huge experience are there differences in teaching and learning methods in developed and developing countries? Yes of course actually that's a very good and relevant questions actually if you want to compare for example teaching methods in Europe in Europe we are very interested in a student center active teaching and learning methods that involve students more in the whole learning process and then teachers have just a role of let's say supervision and explaining the facts and guiding students and it's interesting to say that active teaching and learning in GI education is still being studied in Europe we want to improve it as an example there is an ongoing EU funded project it's called a spider and in this project that Lune University, Delphi University from Netherlands, Leuven, Bohem and Zagreb universities are also partners we are trying to investigate which active teaching learning technique is more suitable for which type of GI education so we are focusing on active learning and developing the techniques in this detail for GI education but if you focus on these developing countries especially those with low income, teaching technique is mainly teacher center technique and the focus on transfer of knowledge from teachers to students so it's some sort of monologue which influences the quality of teaching a lot and from one side it's related to the culture of teaching in these countries and from other side lack of laboratories and the equipments to involve actually actively students in teaching are two main reasons that such approach exists and in our projects we are also trying to influence and change a teaching technique from a teacher center knowledge transfer to a student center active more active teaching and learning education in these countries to also influence if increase the quality of teaching in developing countries especially low income countries oh that's very very interesting thank you so much for sharing with us your experiences so so important that's so important thank you and as we are speaking about something which is centered on people centered on students I I want to ask something to Miriam because she has also experience about putting in the center of education training the people correct I'm thinking about the experience with Espacios Formativo Geochicas yeah thanks let's play shortly what is this Espacios Formativo and then starting from what Ali was saying so putting the as a protagonist the people the women that are involved in this Espacio for training as well yeah sure sure uh Geochicas was born with the three different directions so one of the directions was having more women in your special conferences participation the other one having this networking of women for improving what's happening in your special regarding diversity and the third one is sharing knowledge so Espacios Formativos means kind of a formative spaces is a hearing what people what with women they want to learn to be able to improve the current situation at work or maybe to move to a different direction in their career so we ask within the community of women in just in Geochicas and also allies so what topics we think that will be important to be able to keep building this capacity for for the women participating in Geochicas so first the space will be just for women when we do the webinar and then we share it publicly in YouTube and other spaces for more people to attend that's how we do it yeah but can you better explain or give us some examples yeah for example uh there was people who uh they were willing to improve their uh GIS skills so we ask within the community who has the expertise to be able to share this knowledge and prepare a presentation so for example uh Malena Liedman she was the one raising her hand because she's an expert and then she prepared a webinar in the one we give the diffusion about who wants to participate and then we organize all this sharing knowledge if it's without the network uh also we have been speaking for example with companies like mapbox or carto saying the people wants to learn this tool that you have available in your company so the companies have been really also open and willing to cooperate to be able to give this training for free and also open licenses for the for the women who are participating in Geochicas to be able to keep playing with the tools and improve the way they are doing right now things by this knowledge fantastic and how to reach these Geochicas how it is possible to contact Geochicas and is it open to everyone or you have to subscribe what is the way of being in contact with Geochicas first uh whoever is a woman and feels a woman I mean they can able to join the telegram channel that's kind of the the first approach and second uh we have I mean we have allies uh people who has been also participating if even if they are not women right now we are doing a project with italy for example for caesula mujeres first time in other language they will be in italy so we have this geography professor who reach out in the email of geochicasosm.gmail.com and of course we can participate there the telegram channel is more like a safe space just for women but then I mean they can contact me they can contact through the email to be able to be also allies in the ones they can participate by doing certain actions to promote this education fantastic and there is a telegram in Spanish and a telegram in English correct there is a telegram uh in both languages uh so I mean most of us I mean I would say I am bilingual so they can reach us out in in either of the channels thank you thank you so much thank you and now I want to go back to Ivana because I know that Ivana that you are involved also in another experience which is the experience of geoforol so can you tell us something more about what geoforol is and what people in geoforol are doing and so on yes now good that you asked paria because in fact geoforol is behind largely behind the capacity building working group at the UN Open GIS and so people from from geoforol volunteer to provide a hand with training with assessing with marking with tutoring and so forth so what is geoforol is one of the initiatives at OSgeo which is the foundation to support development and curation of open source software for geospatial uh softwares like QGIS, POS GIS, GeoServer and you name it or some of the editors for OpenStreetMap as well and within this initiative we are a group of people so usually educators GIS educators who are willing to give up their free time to share their knowledge and share resources in an open way so what we've created is a repository now hosted at OSgeo with all sorts of teaching and training materials in a language that those educators have so we have full spectrum of well mostly English but we have some German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian or Portuguese teaching materials so I would suggest to actually check this out on our website which can be reached from osgeo.org within initiatives find geoforol and on that web page there are links to all all things including resources so I find this a very very grand initiative because our mission and vision is to to make sure geospatial education is available to all really to all and most of all to the most most disadvantaged regions and disadvantaged countries so people who benefit from sharing open material are but not exclusively just developing countries so everybody essentially but those that are in need and don't have any resources for paid courses or stuff they can find a lot of useful resources that people donated under open license so mostly CC by attribution okay thank you so much thank you so much and I see that there is a CZ CZ Latamovar here with us oh very welcome CZ and you want to say something? Hi yes welcome everybody I'm very glad to see you all um I was just thinking some nice activities I'm really impressed by your panelists that you invited for this session everybody somehow contributes in improving the knowledge with GIS and it comes from different angles and I'm wondering what is the purpose of this education? Is it really to make these people GIS specialists or not that ambitious just to make them aware of what geo information is and how it can be used to be able to apply it in their daily work so probably it's question really to all three of you probably Ivana if you start what is the purpose of UN and GIS Open Initiative? So UN Open GIS capacity building has the primary aim to train their UN officers or UN GIS officers in the field to be able to to be conversant with open source geo special software because eventually the plan is to migrate to even well either the whole software architecture they're using for their operations or part of it into open platform that's motivated if I'm not wrong it's never it's nowhere on paper but I'm just guessing that it's motivated by by preparing for when the money runs out on for license so that you have a solid solid alternative which is now a fully-fledged alternative to any proprietary software I can say this right so open UN Open GIS is a client so to speak are the officers in the in the first first wave now what happens afterwards I'm guessing that this can be open to wider group of people but for instance some of the NGOs that collaborate with UN can also send their stuff for training as for the geo for all it's really just to to share experience and to give people bits and pieces or a huge repository of material with where they can find bits and pieces they need for their operation and then also give back whatever they produce so it's a network of laboratories which are based off of UN Open Source Geospatial software and that involves also some educational and training material that can be shared across this research. I believe that we have only a few seconds for Ali and Miriam do you want to very very shortly as a source? Yeah I can jump in so from UN Open Street Map I will say I'm not sure about the specialist but I think making people aware how open special data can make visible the invisible I would say that for UN Open Street Map and regarding Jochicas I will say that having these experts with already knowledge in their careers and also it boosts I mean what is happening with some other people who has less opportunities and they are looking forward to move ahead in their careers so I'm not sure I don't think the level we have is for making a specialist but it's making for making people more secure about what they are doing and also being able to have more opportunities in where they want to use a career path I would say. Ali the last word is to you. Very quick answer to your questions you see actually in the projects that I'm coordinating we are developing courses which will be used in university to train students so we are training experts for GI for disaster management. Also the courses will be offered as individual courses to stakeholders so we are generating experts and we expect that these experts will work with you GI for disaster management in practice. Okay fantastic thank you thank you thank you so much unfortunately the time is over because the topic is very very interesting we need to find other moments for discussing about that so I thank you all I thank Ivana Miriam Ali thank you also to CISI for asking questions and see you next time hello thank you thank you
 Good morning, good afternoon everyone, and very welcome to this panel.  I'm Maria Bravelli from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and I'm very happy of being here with you  for presenting a very, very important topic. When we are discussing about geospatial data  management, we can't avoid speaking, discussing, concentrating, focusing also on education.  Education is really the fundamental point, helping girls in aiding citizens, students or citizens  that are aware with respect to what is happening around, and which are well prepared in facing  the situations. Okay, so today we are here with three very important people who are involved in  very huge and important projects, so I'm very happy of introducing to you the three guests  of today. We have Dr. Ivana Ivanova who works as a special science senior lecturer at the School of  Earth and Planetary Science of the Curtin University and Frontier SIO research fellow in special  information infrastructures. Ivana research interests and expertise are in special data quality,  provenance of special resources and special knowledge infrastructures. She's actively involved in  national and international standardization at the ISO and OGC and she collaborates with UNGJM  academic network and with the UN Open GIS initiative. Our second guest is Miriam Gonzalez.  She's co-founder of GRCIC initiative where she promotes more women participation and knowledge  sharing in just special spaces. She has collaborated in projects based on mobile application, location  intelligence and the most recently in Earth observations and currently she is doing partnership  at the Upp32 and Iobas subsidiary which aims to democratize data accessibility from space  and geospatial industries and supporting companies to derive insight to solve challenges on the Earth.  For the past years Miriam has been involved in mapping, promoting OpenStreetMap and  when it opens the map by giving workshops, conferences and coordinating efforts among  open data key players. Then we have Ali Alimansuya, Dr. Ali Mansuya who is an associate professor in  GIS at the Lund University in Sweden. He is a council member of GIL which is one of the largest  GIS associations in Europe. Ali is coordinator of several European funded projects with  international consortiums focusing on research and capacity building on GIS for disaster management  in Europe, Central Asia, Africa and Middle East. His main research interests are open data infrastructure  and special temporal modeling and analysis using artificial intelligence. So you see  our experts are our guests in the fee but we want to focus on. So very welcome to  Ivana, Miriam and Ali as well. So good morning and good afternoon also to you.  As the time is very short I want to start immediately with our questions and specifically I want to start  with Ivana. Ivana, I know that you are involved in projects with United Nations and specifically I want  you to focus on your activities in the UNG special capacity building.  Yes, thank you Maria. Thank you for the excellent introduction and inviting us, inviting me to this  plenary discussion. You are right, very right. I'm right now and at this moment as we speak  involved in a very important UN initiative and that's more specifically initiative of the Geospatial  Division at the UN who is responsible in general for anything special that UN needs for any type of  decision or product producing any type of output. So this division decided sometime in 2016 that  they need to re-evaluate their approach and the use of the software suits for all their operations  primarily those that are in most vulnerable areas such as the UN peacekeeping and peace building  operations and they decided that it's time because of the open source geospatial software maturity  it's time to have a look whether what they used so far should not be replaced with a bit more  flexible and agile tools such as from the OS Geos suits, open source geospatial software suit  and they have found it an initiative what is called now UN Open GIS initiative which looks at various  aspects of using the geospatial software in UN operations. So there are five working groups  focusing on areas such as spatial analysis, artificial intelligence, so finding the right  tools for these types of activities but one of the most essential ones well at least I am convinced  is the capacity building so it's working group two and capacity building theme or topic makes  it as the well makes their objective is to make sure that when the right tools are picked people  who need to operate them are knowledgeable and there are so there are several initiatives and  courses and training sessions offered through this working group and I'm involved in one  which is the training on using post GIS in GIS operations so essentially what we do is to offer  training in introduction to post GIS at basic and advanced level at the same session and our  students, our people from the UN operations team so far we have done something around 10 sessions  also including with other other training so this other training is in QGIS and in these sessions we  are talking about participants in dimensions of around 100 people so 100 staff. Now one of the  interesting things is to mention the pass rate in these courses is not that high so it's around 50  percent but if we think about under the difficult conditions under which our students need to study  and then this is actually quite good because many many times students in the middle of the course  they are asked to relocate under fire essentially so under very dangerous conditions so they just  can't afford to study next to their day operations so that's just the summary and if you are interested  in some of the details we can talk further. Okay can you tell the people if there is a website  and earlier that or what they have to do if they want to have more pieces of information?  Yes there is a website and I'm not sure because I don't see a chat window do we have any?  That probably is enough of writing, googling, UN Open GIS. Yes it's enough to google UN Open  GIS so the website is UNOpenGIS altogether.org and from there all the information is available  and the working group I mentioned was working group two on capacity building and I just want to  add one thing so all material that is produced under UN Open GIS initiative is freely available  to those that want to reuse this and the links are available from the website so I encourage  people to check it out because a lot of useful stuff also for non-UN people. Fantastic thank you  so much thank you so much and we go very quickly to Miriam. Miriam you have a lot of experience  in training citizens also so not only students but citizens for humanitarian support can you  tell us something about that? Yeah sure first I mean thanks also for the invitation to participate  so I have been a volunteer and now I am a part of the board of directors in humanitarian Open  Street Map and if some people don't know what Open Street Map is is the largest your special  database open and crowdsourced so how you can train all these people who wants to volunteer  and participate first of all I would say there are mainly three ways to map one way is remote  mapping so there could be something happening in one side of the world and you can be in the other  side of the world with a computer a satellite image and you can be drawing on top and the second  will be in site in the one you can use maybe field papers in the ones you print what is the  current situation of the map and you can be walking around adding data and the third one will be with  applications such as street complete and GPS tracks and some other things so there are two ways I  would say also training people who volunteer also for doing adding data to the maps we can  organize map patterns we can organize also things with universities we can organize things also with  governments in the ones we gather people in one room and we show them through some slides and  some exercises how to add data to the maps so that's I think one thing the other one kind of more  in the humanitarian NGO format is having these Slack channels in the ones people join the channels  and then you can invite them to be part of some building capacity through some webinars or through  some material already recorded so I think those are mainly the two ways I would say I miss so much  doing the map patterns I tell you when how I started this mapping world was maybe five six  years ago when I was in Mexico City and we started seeing how comparing the data of the maps in  Mexico Latin America versus what was happening in Europe and we said I mean what's happening here I  mean we are like maybe ten years behind so along with some other people in the mapping world which  were mapping independently we said how can we share the knowledge we have about mapping with  more people so we start knocking doors in universities and see how we can train some of the  the their GIS areas or maybe your graphic faculties and I remember I mean one of the most excited  events we we've trained into 80 people so in corona times that seems to be like another time in the  space I miss that so much and I was discussing that with the trainers the other day in the ones  all these people they were they could not believe how much impact they could do by learning how to  do mapping through a website in also in humanitarian tools because we can say the  humanitarian mapping has different responses one is for disaster response which is something is in  crisis at this moment and we need to map really rapidly so you will be needing things to be done  within 24 hours to 48 hours to be able to receive health that can be food it can be shelter it can  be medicine so how can you provide this data almost in immediate response to be able to have  Red Cross or some organizations to be able to support people who is suffering under specific  time so that needs to be a really quick coordination and needs to be done within hours there is a more  long-term goal for sustainable development I think running out of time so that can be done  in a different pace but then people also can be doing mapping for future events that can happen  so that's something else and also yeah where is which which is the website people who want to  have more pieces of information yeah sure the website for a humanitarian open street map is  hotosm.org and also people want to participate in the webinars or in more active participation  they can go to the Slack channels and you have different Slack channels according to the things  you want to participate okay and obviously they can contact you yeah for sure please mapanauta  at gmail.com or twitter open for discussions and happy to help okay thank you so much thank you  so much so we go now to we we want also to invite now Ali and I know that Ali is has a lot of  experience in the projects related to developing countries so education in developing countries  and therefore I want to ask in something more about specifically about the projects related to  disaster management. Thank you Maria also I would like to thank you for inviting me into this panel  like you said I'm coordinating several projects funded by EU and these projects are focusing  on a capacity building in Central Asia, Middle East and Africa on using special technologies  special data infrastructures for disaster management. These projects are being conducted  by consortiums consisting of European universities and also universities from country partners.  Based on the requirements analysis and observations that we have had from these developing countries  in Africa Central Asia and the Middle East actually just in few countries you can find  universities who are offering advanced high quality GI education for disaster management.  In the rest of the countries unfortunately GIS education is still very basic and applications  in disaster management has not been recognized so what we are doing in these countries are that  we develop courses we design a curriculum and also we train trainees to be able to teach the  developed courses so a problem that we found in these countries is that you don't you have lack  of teachers who have required competences to be able to to teach advanced courses so we also  focus on these aspects and besides that we are also developing easy to use tools a web-based  the GIS tools to be used by a stack holders so they can you can disseminate the use of GI technology  for disaster management not only at university level but also between in universities and what I see  as a challenge actually in the future is that how these activities can remain sustainable after the  lifetime of the project when the project is done when the budget is finished how these  universities in developing countries they can continue the work actually teach the courses  keep the courses updated etc etc and this is something that we are also discussing with  European Commission that how it can continue in the future. Oh thank you thank you so much and  I'm asking myself because you have so so huge experience are there differences in teaching  and learning methods in developed and developing countries? Yes of course actually that's a very  good and relevant questions actually if you want to compare for example teaching methods in Europe  in Europe we are very interested in a student center active teaching and learning methods  that involve students more in the whole learning process and then teachers have just a role of  let's say supervision and explaining the facts and guiding students and it's interesting to say that  active teaching and learning in GI education is still being studied in Europe we want to improve it  as an example there is an ongoing EU funded project it's called a spider and in this project  that Lune University, Delphi University from Netherlands, Leuven, Bohem and Zagreb universities  are also partners we are trying to investigate which active teaching learning technique is more  suitable for which type of GI education so we are focusing on active learning and developing the  techniques in this detail for GI education but if you focus on these developing countries especially  those with low income, teaching technique is mainly teacher center technique and the focus on  transfer of knowledge from teachers to students so it's some sort of monologue which influences the  quality of teaching a lot and from one side it's related to the culture of teaching in these countries  and from other side lack of laboratories and the equipments to involve actually actively  students in teaching are two main reasons that such approach exists and in our projects we are also  trying to influence and change a teaching technique from a teacher center knowledge transfer to a  student center active more active teaching and learning education in these countries to also  influence if increase the quality of teaching in developing countries especially low income countries  oh that's very very interesting thank you so much for sharing with us your experiences so so  important that's so important thank you and as we are speaking about something which is centered on  people centered on students I I want to ask something to Miriam because she has also experience about  putting in the center of education training the people correct I'm thinking about the experience  with Espacios Formativo Geochicas yeah thanks let's play shortly what is this  Espacios Formativo and then starting from what Ali was saying so putting the as a protagonist  the people the women that are involved in this Espacio for training as well yeah sure sure uh  Geochicas was born with the three different directions so one of the directions was having  more women in your special conferences participation the other one having this networking of women for  improving what's happening in your special regarding diversity and the third one is sharing knowledge  so Espacios Formativos means kind of a formative spaces is a hearing what people what with women  they want to learn to be able to improve the current situation at work or maybe to move to a  different direction in their career so we ask within the community of women in just in Geochicas  and also allies so what topics we think that will be important to be able to keep building this  capacity for for the women participating in Geochicas so first the space will be just for  women when we do the webinar and then we share it publicly in YouTube and other spaces for more  people to attend that's how we do it yeah but can you better explain or give us some examples  yeah for example uh there was people who uh they were willing to improve their  uh GIS skills so we ask within the community who has the expertise to be able to share this  knowledge and prepare a presentation so for example uh Malena Liedman she was the one  raising her hand because she's an expert and then she prepared a webinar in the one we give the  diffusion about who wants to participate and then we organize all this sharing knowledge  if it's without the network uh also we have been speaking for example with companies like  mapbox or carto saying the people wants to learn this tool that you have available in your company  so the companies have been really also open and willing to cooperate to be able to give this  training for free and also open licenses for the for the women who are participating in Geochicas  to be able to keep playing with the tools and improve the way they are doing right now things  by this knowledge fantastic and how to reach these Geochicas how it is possible to contact  Geochicas and is it open to everyone or you have to subscribe what is the way of being in contact  with Geochicas first uh whoever is a woman and feels a woman I mean they can able to join the  telegram channel that's kind of the the first approach and second uh we have I mean we have  allies uh people who has been also participating if even if they are not women right now we are  doing a project with italy for example for caesula mujeres first time in other language they will be  in italy so we have this geography professor who reach out in the email of geochicasosm.gmail.com  and of course we can participate there the telegram channel is more like a safe space  just for women but then I mean they can contact me they can contact through the email to be able  to be also allies in the ones they can participate by doing certain actions to promote this education  fantastic and there is a telegram in Spanish and a telegram in English correct there is a  telegram uh in both languages uh so I mean most of us I mean I would say I am bilingual so they  can reach us out in in either of the channels thank you thank you so much thank you and now  I want to go back to Ivana because I know that Ivana that you are involved also in another  experience which is the experience of geoforol so can you tell us something more about what  geoforol is and what people in geoforol are doing and so on yes now good that you asked  paria because in fact geoforol is behind largely behind the capacity building working group at  the UN Open GIS and so people from from geoforol volunteer to provide a hand with training with  assessing with marking with tutoring and so forth so what is geoforol is one of the initiatives at  OSgeo which is the foundation to support development and curation of open source software for geospatial  uh softwares like QGIS, POS GIS, GeoServer and you name it or some of the editors for  OpenStreetMap as well and within this initiative we are a group of people so usually educators GIS  educators who are willing to give up their free time to share their knowledge and share resources  in an open way so what we've created is a repository now hosted at OSgeo with all sorts of  teaching and training materials in a language that those educators have so we have full spectrum of  well mostly English but we have some German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian or Portuguese  teaching materials so I would suggest to actually check this out on our website which  can be reached from osgeo.org within initiatives find geoforol and on that web page there are links  to all all things including resources so I find this a very very grand initiative because our  mission and vision is to to make sure geospatial education is available to all really to all and  most of all to the most most disadvantaged regions and disadvantaged countries so people who benefit  from sharing open material are but not exclusively just developing countries so everybody essentially  but those that are in need and don't have any resources for paid courses or stuff they can  find a lot of useful resources that people donated under open license so mostly CC by attribution  okay thank you so much thank you so much and I see that there is a CZ CZ Latamovar here with us  oh very welcome CZ and you want to say something? Hi yes welcome everybody I'm very glad to see you all  um I was just thinking some nice activities I'm really impressed by your panelists that you  invited for this session everybody somehow contributes in improving the knowledge with  GIS and it comes from different angles and I'm wondering what is the purpose of this education?  Is it really to make these people GIS specialists or not that ambitious just to make them aware of  what geo information is and how it can be used to be able to apply it in their daily work so  probably it's question really to all three of you probably Ivana if you start what is the purpose of  UN and GIS Open Initiative? So UN Open GIS capacity building has the primary aim to train their UN  officers or UN GIS officers in the field to be able to to be conversant with open source geo  special software because eventually the plan is to migrate to even well either the whole  software architecture they're using for their operations or part of it into open platform  that's motivated if I'm not wrong it's never it's nowhere on paper but I'm just guessing that it's  motivated by by preparing for when the money runs out on for license so that you have a solid  solid alternative which is now a fully-fledged alternative to any proprietary software I can  say this right so open UN Open GIS is a client so to speak are the officers in the in the first  first wave now what happens afterwards I'm guessing that this can be open to wider group of people  but for instance some of the NGOs that collaborate with UN can also send their stuff for training  as for the geo for all it's really just to to share experience and to give people bits and  pieces or a huge repository of material with where they can find bits and pieces they need  for their operation and then also give back whatever they produce so it's a network of laboratories  which are based off of UN Open Source Geospatial software and that involves also some educational  and training material that can be shared across this research. I believe that we have only a few  seconds for Ali and Miriam do you want to very very shortly as a source? Yeah I can jump in so  from UN Open Street Map I will say I'm not sure about the specialist but I think making people  aware how open special data can make visible the invisible I would say that for UN Open Street Map  and regarding Jochicas I will say that having these experts with already knowledge in their  careers and also it boosts I mean what is happening with some other people who has less  opportunities and they are looking forward to move ahead in their careers so I'm not sure I  don't think the level we have is for making a specialist but it's making for making people  more secure about what they are doing and also being able to have more opportunities in where  they want to use a career path I would say. Ali the last word is to you. Very quick answer to your  questions you see actually in the projects that I'm coordinating we are developing courses  which will be used in university to train students so we are training experts for  GI for disaster management. Also the courses will be offered as individual courses to  stakeholders so we are generating experts and we expect that these experts will work with  you GI for disaster management in practice. Okay fantastic thank you thank you thank you so much  unfortunately the time is over because the topic is very very interesting we need to find other  moments for discussing about that so I thank you all I thank Ivana Miriam Ali thank you also to  CISI for asking questions and see you next time hello thank you thank you
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Good morning, good afternoon everyone, and very welcome to this panel. I'm Maria Bravelli from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and I'm very happy of being here with you for presenting a very, very important topic. When we are discussing about geospatial data management, we can't avoid speaking, discussing, concentrating, focusing also on education. Education is really the fundamental point, helping girls in aiding citizens, students or citizens that are aware with respect to what is happening around, and which are well prepared in facing the situations. Okay, so today we are here with three very important people who are involved in very huge and important projects, so I'm very happy of introducing to you the three guests of today. We have Dr. Ivana Ivanova who works as a special science senior lecturer at the School of Earth and Planetary Science of the Curtin University and Frontier SIO research fellow in special information infrastructures. Ivana research interests and expertise are in special data quality, provenance of special resources and special knowledge infrastructures. She's actively involved in national and international standardization at the ISO and OGC and she collaborates with UNGJM academic network and with the UN Open GIS initiative. Our second guest is Miriam Gonzalez. She's co-founder of GRCIC initiative where she promotes more women participation and knowledge sharing in just special spaces. She has collaborated in projects based on mobile application, location intelligence and the most recently in Earth observations and currently she is doing partnership at the Upp32 and Iobas subsidiary which aims to democratize data accessibility from space and geospatial industries and supporting companies to derive insight to solve challenges on the Earth. For the past years Miriam has been involved in mapping, promoting OpenStreetMap and when it opens the map by giving workshops, conferences and coordinating efforts among open data key players. Then we have Ali Alimansuya, Dr. Ali Mansuya who is an associate professor in GIS at the Lund University in Sweden. He is a council member of GIL which is one of the largest GIS associations in Europe. Ali is coordinator of several European funded projects with international consortiums focusing on research and capacity building on GIS for disaster management in Europe, Central Asia, Africa and Middle East. His main research interests are open data infrastructure and special temporal modeling and analysis using artificial intelligence. So you see our experts are our guests in the fee but we want to focus on. So very welcome to Ivana, Miriam and Ali as well. So good morning and good afternoon also to you. As the time is very short I want to start immediately with our questions and specifically I want to start with Ivana. Ivana, I know that you are involved in projects with United Nations and specifically I want you to focus on your activities in the UNG special capacity building. Yes, thank you Maria. Thank you for the excellent introduction and inviting us, inviting me to this plenary discussion. You are right, very right. I'm right now and at this moment as we speak involved in a very important UN initiative and that's more specifically initiative of the Geospatial Division at the UN who is responsible in general for anything special that UN needs for any type of decision or product producing any type of output. So this division decided sometime in 2016 that they need to re-evaluate their approach and the use of the software suits for all their operations primarily those that are in most vulnerable areas such as the UN peacekeeping and peace building operations and they decided that it's time because of the open source geospatial software maturity it's time to have a look whether what they used so far should not be replaced with a bit more flexible and agile tools such as from the OS Geos suits, open source geospatial software suit and they have found it an initiative what is called now UN Open GIS initiative which looks at various aspects of using the geospatial software in UN operations. So there are five working groups focusing on areas such as spatial analysis, artificial intelligence, so finding the right tools for these types of activities but one of the most essential ones well at least I am convinced is the capacity building so it's working group two and capacity building theme or topic makes it as the well makes their objective is to make sure that when the right tools are picked people who need to operate them are knowledgeable and there are so there are several initiatives and courses and training sessions offered through this working group and I'm involved in one which is the training on using post GIS in GIS operations so essentially what we do is to offer training in introduction to post GIS at basic and advanced level at the same session and our students, our people from the UN operations team so far we have done something around 10 sessions also including with other other training so this other training is in QGIS and in these sessions we are talking about participants in dimensions of around 100 people so 100 staff. Now one of the interesting things is to mention the pass rate in these courses is not that high so it's around 50 percent but if we think about under the difficult conditions under which our students need to study and then this is actually quite good because many many times students in the middle of the course they are asked to relocate under fire essentially so under very dangerous conditions so they just can't afford to study next to their day operations so that's just the summary and if you are interested in some of the details we can talk further. Okay can you tell the people if there is a website and earlier that or what they have to do if they want to have more pieces of information? Yes there is a website and I'm not sure because I don't see a chat window do we have any? That probably is enough of writing, googling, UN Open GIS. Yes it's enough to google UN Open GIS so the website is UNOpenGIS altogether.org and from there all the information is available and the working group I mentioned was working group two on capacity building and I just want to add one thing so all material that is produced under UN Open GIS initiative is freely available to those that want to reuse this and the links are available from the website so I encourage people to check it out because a lot of useful stuff also for non-UN people. Fantastic thank you so much thank you so much and we go very quickly to Miriam. Miriam you have a lot of experience in training citizens also so not only students but citizens for humanitarian support can you tell us something about that? Yeah sure first I mean thanks also for the invitation to participate so I have been a volunteer and now I am a part of the board of directors in humanitarian Open Street Map and if some people don't know what Open Street Map is is the largest your special database open and crowdsourced so how you can train all these people who wants to volunteer and participate first of all I would say there are mainly three ways to map one way is remote mapping so there could be something happening in one side of the world and you can be in the other side of the world with a computer a satellite image and you can be drawing on top and the second will be in site in the one you can use maybe field papers in the ones you print what is the current situation of the map and you can be walking around adding data and the third one will be with applications such as street complete and GPS tracks and some other things so there are two ways I would say also training people who volunteer also for doing adding data to the maps we can organize map patterns we can organize also things with universities we can organize things also with governments in the ones we gather people in one room and we show them through some slides and some exercises how to add data to the maps so that's I think one thing the other one kind of more in the humanitarian NGO format is having these Slack channels in the ones people join the channels and then you can invite them to be part of some building capacity through some webinars or through some material already recorded so I think those are mainly the two ways I would say I miss so much doing the map patterns I tell you when how I started this mapping world was maybe five six years ago when I was in Mexico City and we started seeing how comparing the data of the maps in Mexico Latin America versus what was happening in Europe and we said I mean what's happening here I mean we are like maybe ten years behind so along with some other people in the mapping world which were mapping independently we said how can we share the knowledge we have about mapping with more people so we start knocking doors in universities and see how we can train some of the the their GIS areas or maybe your graphic faculties and I remember I mean one of the most excited events we we've trained into 80 people so in corona times that seems to be like another time in the space I miss that so much and I was discussing that with the trainers the other day in the ones all these people they were they could not believe how much impact they could do by learning how to do mapping through a website in also in humanitarian tools because we can say the humanitarian mapping has different responses one is for disaster response which is something is in crisis at this moment and we need to map really rapidly so you will be needing things to be done within 24 hours to 48 hours to be able to receive health that can be food it can be shelter it can be medicine so how can you provide this data almost in immediate response to be able to have Red Cross or some organizations to be able to support people who is suffering under specific time so that needs to be a really quick coordination and needs to be done within hours there is a more long-term goal for sustainable development I think running out of time so that can be done in a different pace but then people also can be doing mapping for future events that can happen so that's something else and also yeah where is which which is the website people who want to have more pieces of information yeah sure the website for a humanitarian open street map is hotosm.org and also people want to participate in the webinars or in more active participation they can go to the Slack channels and you have different Slack channels according to the things you want to participate okay and obviously they can contact you yeah for sure please mapanauta at gmail.com or twitter open for discussions and happy to help okay thank you so much thank you so much so we go now to we we want also to invite now Ali and I know that Ali is has a lot of experience in the projects related to developing countries so education in developing countries and therefore I want to ask in something more about specifically about the projects related to disaster management. Thank you Maria also I would like to thank you for inviting me into this panel like you said I'm coordinating several projects funded by EU and these projects are focusing on a capacity building in Central Asia, Middle East and Africa on using special technologies special data infrastructures for disaster management. These projects are being conducted by consortiums consisting of European universities and also universities from country partners. Based on the requirements analysis and observations that we have had from these developing countries in Africa Central Asia and the Middle East actually just in few countries you can find universities who are offering advanced high quality GI education for disaster management. In the rest of the countries unfortunately GIS education is still very basic and applications in disaster management has not been recognized so what we are doing in these countries are that we develop courses we design a curriculum and also we train trainees to be able to teach the developed courses so a problem that we found in these countries is that you don't you have lack of teachers who have required competences to be able to to teach advanced courses so we also focus on these aspects and besides that we are also developing easy to use tools a web-based the GIS tools to be used by a stack holders so they can you can disseminate the use of GI technology for disaster management not only at university level but also between in universities and what I see as a challenge actually in the future is that how these activities can remain sustainable after the lifetime of the project when the project is done when the budget is finished how these universities in developing countries they can continue the work actually teach the courses keep the courses updated etc etc and this is something that we are also discussing with European Commission that how it can continue in the future. Oh thank you thank you so much and I'm asking myself because you have so so huge experience are there differences in teaching and learning methods in developed and developing countries? Yes of course actually that's a very good and relevant questions actually if you want to compare for example teaching methods in Europe in Europe we are very interested in a student center active teaching and learning methods that involve students more in the whole learning process and then teachers have just a role of let's say supervision and explaining the facts and guiding students and it's interesting to say that active teaching and learning in GI education is still being studied in Europe we want to improve it as an example there is an ongoing EU funded project it's called a spider and in this project that Lune University, Delphi University from Netherlands, Leuven, Bohem and Zagreb universities are also partners we are trying to investigate which active teaching learning technique is more suitable for which type of GI education so we are focusing on active learning and developing the techniques in this detail for GI education but if you focus on these developing countries especially those with low income, teaching technique is mainly teacher center technique and the focus on transfer of knowledge from teachers to students so it's some sort of monologue which influences the quality of teaching a lot and from one side it's related to the culture of teaching in these countries and from other side lack of laboratories and the equipments to involve actually actively students in teaching are two main reasons that such approach exists and in our projects we are also trying to influence and change a teaching technique from a teacher center knowledge transfer to a student center active more active teaching and learning education in these countries to also influence if increase the quality of teaching in developing countries especially low income countries oh that's very very interesting thank you so much for sharing with us your experiences so so important that's so important thank you and as we are speaking about something which is centered on people centered on students I I want to ask something to Miriam because she has also experience about putting in the center of education training the people correct I'm thinking about the experience with Espacios Formativo Geochicas yeah thanks let's play shortly what is this Espacios Formativo and then starting from what Ali was saying so putting the as a protagonist the people the women that are involved in this Espacio for training as well yeah sure sure uh Geochicas was born with the three different directions so one of the directions was having more women in your special conferences participation the other one having this networking of women for improving what's happening in your special regarding diversity and the third one is sharing knowledge so Espacios Formativos means kind of a formative spaces is a hearing what people what with women they want to learn to be able to improve the current situation at work or maybe to move to a different direction in their career so we ask within the community of women in just in Geochicas and also allies so what topics we think that will be important to be able to keep building this capacity for for the women participating in Geochicas so first the space will be just for women when we do the webinar and then we share it publicly in YouTube and other spaces for more people to attend that's how we do it yeah but can you better explain or give us some examples yeah for example uh there was people who uh they were willing to improve their uh GIS skills so we ask within the community who has the expertise to be able to share this knowledge and prepare a presentation so for example uh Malena Liedman she was the one raising her hand because she's an expert and then she prepared a webinar in the one we give the diffusion about who wants to participate and then we organize all this sharing knowledge if it's without the network uh also we have been speaking for example with companies like mapbox or carto saying the people wants to learn this tool that you have available in your company so the companies have been really also open and willing to cooperate to be able to give this training for free and also open licenses for the for the women who are participating in Geochicas to be able to keep playing with the tools and improve the way they are doing right now things by this knowledge fantastic and how to reach these Geochicas how it is possible to contact Geochicas and is it open to everyone or you have to subscribe what is the way of being in contact with Geochicas first uh whoever is a woman and feels a woman I mean they can able to join the telegram channel that's kind of the the first approach and second uh we have I mean we have allies uh people who has been also participating if even if they are not women right now we are doing a project with italy for example for caesula mujeres first time in other language they will be in italy so we have this geography professor who reach out in the email of geochicasosm.gmail.com and of course we can participate there the telegram channel is more like a safe space just for women but then I mean they can contact me they can contact through the email to be able to be also allies in the ones they can participate by doing certain actions to promote this education fantastic and there is a telegram in Spanish and a telegram in English correct there is a telegram uh in both languages uh so I mean most of us I mean I would say I am bilingual so they can reach us out in in either of the channels thank you thank you so much thank you and now I want to go back to Ivana because I know that Ivana that you are involved also in another experience which is the experience of geoforol so can you tell us something more about what geoforol is and what people in geoforol are doing and so on yes now good that you asked paria because in fact geoforol is behind largely behind the capacity building working group at the UN Open GIS and so people from from geoforol volunteer to provide a hand with training with assessing with marking with tutoring and so forth so what is geoforol is one of the initiatives at OSgeo which is the foundation to support development and curation of open source software for geospatial uh softwares like QGIS, POS GIS, GeoServer and you name it or some of the editors for OpenStreetMap as well and within this initiative we are a group of people so usually educators GIS educators who are willing to give up their free time to share their knowledge and share resources in an open way so what we've created is a repository now hosted at OSgeo with all sorts of teaching and training materials in a language that those educators have so we have full spectrum of well mostly English but we have some German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian or Portuguese teaching materials so I would suggest to actually check this out on our website which can be reached from osgeo.org within initiatives find geoforol and on that web page there are links to all all things including resources so I find this a very very grand initiative because our mission and vision is to to make sure geospatial education is available to all really to all and most of all to the most most disadvantaged regions and disadvantaged countries so people who benefit from sharing open material are but not exclusively just developing countries so everybody essentially but those that are in need and don't have any resources for paid courses or stuff they can find a lot of useful resources that people donated under open license so mostly CC by attribution okay thank you so much thank you so much and I see that there is a CZ CZ Latamovar here with us oh very welcome CZ and you want to say something? Hi yes welcome everybody I'm very glad to see you all um I was just thinking some nice activities I'm really impressed by your panelists that you invited for this session everybody somehow contributes in improving the knowledge with GIS and it comes from different angles and I'm wondering what is the purpose of this education? Is it really to make these people GIS specialists or not that ambitious just to make them aware of what geo information is and how it can be used to be able to apply it in their daily work so probably it's question really to all three of you probably Ivana if you start what is the purpose of UN and GIS Open Initiative? So UN Open GIS capacity building has the primary aim to train their UN officers or UN GIS officers in the field to be able to to be conversant with open source geo special software because eventually the plan is to migrate to even well either the whole software architecture they're using for their operations or part of it into open platform that's motivated if I'm not wrong it's never it's nowhere on paper but I'm just guessing that it's motivated by by preparing for when the money runs out on for license so that you have a solid solid alternative which is now a fully-fledged alternative to any proprietary software I can say this right so open UN Open GIS is a client so to speak are the officers in the in the first first wave now what happens afterwards I'm guessing that this can be open to wider group of people but for instance some of the NGOs that collaborate with UN can also send their stuff for training as for the geo for all it's really just to to share experience and to give people bits and pieces or a huge repository of material with where they can find bits and pieces they need for their operation and then also give back whatever they produce so it's a network of laboratories which are based off of UN Open Source Geospatial software and that involves also some educational and training material that can be shared across this research. I believe that we have only a few seconds for Ali and Miriam do you want to very very shortly as a source? Yeah I can jump in so from UN Open Street Map I will say I'm not sure about the specialist but I think making people aware how open special data can make visible the invisible I would say that for UN Open Street Map and regarding Jochicas I will say that having these experts with already knowledge in their careers and also it boosts I mean what is happening with some other people who has less opportunities and they are looking forward to move ahead in their careers so I'm not sure I don't think the level we have is for making a specialist but it's making for making people more secure about what they are doing and also being able to have more opportunities in where they want to use a career path I would say. Ali the last word is to you. Very quick answer to your questions you see actually in the projects that I'm coordinating we are developing courses which will be used in university to train students so we are training experts for GI for disaster management. Also the courses will be offered as individual courses to stakeholders so we are generating experts and we expect that these experts will work with you GI for disaster management in practice. Okay fantastic thank you thank you thank you so much unfortunately the time is over because the topic is very very interesting we need to find other moments for discussing about that so I thank you all I thank Ivana Miriam Ali thank you also to CISI for asking questions and see you next time hello thank you thank you
without the network uh also we have been speaking license so that you have a solid solid