Dear All, We are pleased to send you the summary updates from the very successful AgriGIS Workshop & Think Tank meetings in Nairobi organised jointly by the The University of Nottingham, the Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD), the Global Open Data for Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) and Crops for the Future (CFF) on October 27-28, 2016.
The objective of the event was to provide a forum for stakeholders in agricultural research organizations in Africa to share knowledge and propose strategies on improving the use of open data, open educational resources , free and open geospatial software with the aim to expand Capacity Building and Training in AgriGIS to support Global Food Security. The slides of the event are at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/grace/events/agrigis-kenya-slides.aspx We thank all the participants for their inputs and contributions for the Think-Tank discussions which covered the following themes (details to the summary of each theme are available at the event website) * Big challenges for Agriculture in the African context * Tools (known & wish list) used for agri using satellite/remote data collection * Existing or potential data sets we would like to use * Practical, technical, policy, impementation obstacles to Location aspects/geotechnologies for agri * Data and Modelling There was interest and support from participants for the need for Open Data in Agriculture and initiatives like GODAN [1]. Some of the key themes that emerged from the Think Tank discussions were the following * Importance of the need of an organisation locally to facilitate and ensure sustainability of AgriGIS * Spearheading open data and free and open software use for cost savings, expanding innovation and sustainability * Need for Capacity building among stakeholders We are getting lot of emails of interest lot of colleagues in Africa expressing interest in follow up activities. We are pleased to inform that Center for Agricultural Networking and Information Sharing (CANIS) , Kenya has volunteered to host the secretariat for the Think Tank for developing as a focal point for interaction with other stakeholders on Open GIS and open data and keep building the ideas from the ThinkTank. We thank Kiringai Kamau and colleagues at CANIS for their support. Please contact Kiringai (email - [email protected] ) for expanding AgriGIS momentum in Kenya. We are also pleased to welcome CANIS as our new GeoforAll lab in Kenya. It is good to see many blogposts from participants of the workshop such as the one at GEOSYMP http://geosymp.com/2016/10/what-happened-at-the-agrigis-workshop-and-think-tank/ We would like to specifically thank our hosts RCMRD ( Dr Hussein Farah and all colleagues) for their excellent organisation and arrangements including the hands on workshop . We need to also make use of the community and momentum build by the ThinkTank for expanding future collaborations and make sure the community is kept updated. Please make use of the Twitter created to share your ideas https://twitter.com/hashtag/agrigisnr2016?f=tweets&vertical=default&src=hash We shared some examples of research at Nottingham at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/genius/documents/egrasp-nairobi.pdf We are hoping to keep building the collaborations in AgriGIS to support Global Food Security. Best wishes, Suchith [1] http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/genius/documents/godan-uon-intro.pdf This message and any attachment are intended solely for the addressee and may contain confidential information. If you have received this message in error, please send it back to me, and immediately delete it. Please do not use, copy or disclose the information contained in this message or in any attachment. Any views or opinions expressed by the author of this email do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Nottingham. This message has been checked for viruses but the contents of an attachment may still contain software viruses which could damage your computer system, you are advised to perform your own checks. Email communications with the University of Nottingham may be monitored as permitted by UK legislation.
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