[Board] OSGeo membership in GLTN

[Arnulf Christl]

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Dear Board,
I am currently working on a project for the UN-Habitat Office. They
develop an Open Source project called STDM (social tenure domain
model). It is a tool, data schema and concept to help data collection
of tenure data in informal settlements:
http://www.gltn.net/index.php/land-tools/social-tenure-domain-model-stdm

The toolset includes a plug-in for QGIS and a data schema for PostGIS.
STDM is a dedicated pro-poor effort and has been designed especially
to address the continuum of tenure relations typically found in
informal settlements. Slums usually lack a cadaster or other precise
mapping background and the relations between ownership and tenure are
not well defined. This tool is designed to address these issues.

The project has been started through GLTN (the Global Land Tool
Network, http://www.gltn.net/) a non-profit association dedicated to
developing tools for land registry and management. We (OSGeo) have now
been invited to become a partner of this association. Joining this
partnership will allow partners to fund individuals through OSGeo to
join forces on the project, collaborate on the software, take part in
meetings, conferences, workshops, etc.

Our side of the commitment would be the provision of infrastructure
support for the STDM tool, the kind of support we already give to some
projects. The current focus lies on operating the mailing lists for
the project and set up a landing page in our Wiki (which I both commit
to doing). The STDM project has been set up in compliance with OSGeo's
way of doing things, the code will be Open Source, the documentation
available for free, etc. The coding aspect of the project is not very
big so we currently do not foresee the need to go through incubation
but it might be a nice addition for our OSGeo Live effort.

OSGeo's support for QGIS and PostGIS is highly appreciated by GLTN and
they acknowledge this as part of our active support in this
partnership. So basically we are already doing all that they need and
in turn they would like to give back through this partnership.

I have already confirmed that we can set up mailing lists and will do
this in the next days (see ticket #1295).

Could the board please go through the attached draft request for
membership and raise any questions you might have. Please note that I
will only be available until the end of the week but you can also
contact Danilo Antonio directly, he is the project lead at UN-Habitat
and copied in this mail - or Clarissa Augustinus, Chief, Land & Tenure
Section, UN-HABITAT.

I would be happy to act as the initial point of contact unless
somebody else with a better background in our African OSGeo chapter
activities is highly interested in further developing this relationship.

Best regards,
Arnulf

PS:
Please note that I will be away most of the rest of February and into
March.

- -- 
Arnulf Christl (Director)
The metaspatial Institute Certification:
Open Source - Open Data - Open Standards
http://www.metaspatial.net/en/institute
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