It is our great pleasure to inform the final program of “Open Source GIS for the United Nations and Developing Countries” special session on 16th September 2015 at FOSS4G Seoul. It was made possible thanks esp. to the efforts of Dr. Junyoung Choi, Sanghee Shin and many colleagues. There is a really great program lined up with examples of Open Source GIS from climate change to improving public health delivery. It is great to see the focus also on smart cities esp. the work on Open source and open data for smart cities in developing countries by Prof. Serena Coetzee ( University of Pretoria, South Africa ) will be really useful for our future.
More details at http://2015.foss4g.org/united-nations-special-session/
During the session, we’ll talk about the adoptions/experiences of open source GIS in UN and developing countries. Also there will be panel discussions on how to utilise the open source GIS for the sustainable development.
On behalf of ‘Geo for All’ we are determined to build ideas and make this a regular session at all future main FOSS4G Global events. We want all our Geo4All labs to support and work towards the work towards the vision of the UN Millennium Development Goals [1] for building a better world and this session will help us build more collaborations and activities in the future. It is key part of our criteria and principles [2].
Service for the benefit and betterment of humanity is a key fundamental principle of “Geo for All” and we want to contribute and focus our efforts for the UN Millennium Development Goals.
There are four areas that we can contribute our joint expertise for global development and eradicating extreme poverty. Even though the scale of these global challenges are big , together we can combine forces and efforts contributing to the UN Millennium Development Goals.
So this UN focussed session at FOSS4G Seoul is great start for expanding our collaborations .
There will also be “Geo for All” [3] meetings that will be chaired by Prof. Venkatesh Raghavan (Osaka City University, Japan) during FOSS4G Seoul where we will discuss and plan future collaborations. Everyone planning to attend FOSS4G Seoul are welcome.
[1] http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/
[2] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Geoforall_criteria
[3] http://www.geoforall.org