[OSGeo Africa] Some feedback on the Open GIS data day held at NGI on Friday

[Tim Sutton]

Hi All

I just wanted to give a little feedback on the open day held at NGI on friday. There were around 30 attendees and a variety of talks about open data and all the cool stuff you can do with it. I think the main take home for me is that in general (though not always) there is great willingness to share data within South African National and local government but there is room for improvement, especially in these areas:

* Providing adequate metadata with data so we can see what the data is, when it was created / last updated etc. and whether the data is canonical or not
* Making data more easily accessible - especially with 'clip and ship' and tiling / OGC services for spatial data
* Making people in public office understand that it is good for the wellbeing of your citizens and local economy to share data gathered with tax payer money so that more data can be opened up (e.g. especially from smaller communities)

The talks highlighted some great examples of how interesting insights can be obtained from public data.

Following the talks there was an open discussion segment, and I particularly enjoyed the chat about projections with Aslam Parker. It inspired me to have a play around a bit more with projections in QGIS...one thing led to another and I landed up doing this:

https://gist.github.com/timlinux/1057c2c6b5ebda6ed2b5aa8c5aa21372

I'm looking forward to future meet ups with he FOSS GIS / Open Data community - Aslam has kindly offered the venue at NGI for future meet ups, so watch this space!

Regards

Tim
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Tim Sutton

Co-founder: Kartoza
Project chair: QGIS.org

Visit http://kartoza.com <http://kartoza.com/> to find out about open source:

Desktop GIS programming services
Geospatial web development
GIS Training
Consulting Services

Skype: timlinux
IRC: timlinux on #qgis at freenode.net

Kartoza is a merger between Linfiniti and Afrispatial

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