Abstract
Abstract. The UN Open GIS Initiative is to identify and develop, under UN guidance, an Open Source GIS bundle that meets the requirements of UN operations, taking full advantage of the expertise of mission partners (partner nations, technology contributing countries, international organizations, academia, NGO’s, private sector). The project, started in 2016, is composed by 4 working groups. One of the working group is specifically related to Capacity Building, given its importance for the success of the project. UN Open GIS will be based on some existing open source geospatial software (packages and libraries) with many extensions specifically developed. The users of the platform will be the UN staff supporting with mapping and GIS the peacekeeping missions. Therefore, they are generally expert of this specific domain, even if they are currently using proprietary software. UN Open GIS Capacity Building is specifically thought for covering this gap, providing them the suitable background about open source geospatial software in general and the education tailored to the solution that has been being developed within the project itself.
Highlights
FOSS4G (Free and Open Source for Geospatial) are geospatial software that provide the user with the freedom to run the program for any purpose, access the source code to study how it works, change it and redistribute copies of modified versions of the software (GNU Project, 1996)
The different communities were spontaneously born around a project or a piece of software and only had sporadic interaction but in February 2006, some leading teams in the free and open source geospatial world joined their efforts to create OSGeo, Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo Wiki, 2017; Di Stefano, 2017; FOSSGIS, 2017), a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data and to promote their widespread use
The users of the platform will be the United Nations (UN) staff supporting with mapping and Geospatial Information Section (GIS) to peacekeeping missions
Summary
FOSS4G (Free and Open Source for Geospatial) are geospatial software that provide the user with the freedom to run the program for any purpose, access the source code to study how it works, change it and redistribute copies of modified versions of the software (GNU Project, 1996). Even if still at the incubation stage, all the necessary materials and support for the Community are provided (forums, wikis, and mailing lists) and specific national or international short meetings are usually organized These occasions are generally linked to ad-hoc Hackers' Code Sprints. Different support arrangements are made available by the global community for people embracing the usage or development of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) tools: the OSGeo portal and specific websites for the different projects, forums, wikis, mailing lists global and related to the various projects or initiatives, blogs, Web tutorials and Webinars and the monthly Newsletter provided by the OSGeo Education Committee, which is named GeoForAll, (GeoForAll-ISE, 2017).
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