[OSGeo-Discuss] "Geo for All - Open GIS Mentoring Program" ideas welcome from the geocommunity

Tue Jul 7 00:29:22 PDT 2015

Dear Suchit,

I am writing you as the President of Attivarti.org.

I am occasionally contributing to this discussion list, mostly to advertize
initiatives we manage in Italy/Europe, and more occasionally commenting on
"policy issues".

a) Attivarti.org is a small non-governmental organization, just for years
old (formally an "associazione di promozione sociale" in Italian
legislation). You may check out www.attivarit.org and its English language
sections for more information (or I can send you separate fact sheets).

b) Now (July 2015) we are starting are first two internships for new
graduates.
This is happening in the context of MoUs signed with Italian Universities,
and we are also active in a EU COST Action where more tutoring and student
exchange activities are happening.

c) In fact, the association is the current formal status of a team which
has for some members over twenty years of experience in geomatics.

Personally I created and managed what we could define as "geospatial labs"
in 1994-1996 (Politecnico di Milano, Dept. of Hydraulics, being probably
one of the first five people to administer GRASS in Italy), and then in
1997-2002 at CRS4 (a research lab part of the Science and Technology Park
in Sardinia).

please see http://www.pibinko.org for details

d) about geospatial labs:

Between 2002 and 2010 I have been working for the Milan, Italy, branch of a
US corporation, where I was in fact managing the GIS resources for a team
of 25 (and involving also survey work)

In terms of topics, I have been working on GIS / remote sensing / web
projects

e) Since 2007 I have started to develop my independent stream of research.
Key topics include

- capacity building and development in rural areas
- participatory processes
- lean methodologies
- intertwinining of cultural and environmental issues as a social driver

this is on top of international experience in GIS for water resources,
facility management, contaminated site investigations and remediation ec.

f) Our current flagship project is calle "BuioMetria Partecipativa". We
started this in 2008 as a tiny VGI project. We are now just over the
seventh birthday for the project, and have seen a stable growth for it.

g) A peculiarity of our work is that this has -to date- taken place with a
neglectable component of public funding, and with a very limited support by
academia...so, in a way, I could say we have an example of a community
which operates with an independent R&D group.

h) Note that we are not shy, nor do we refrain from constantly seeking
partentships...In almost ten years of "civic hacking" I have met quite a
large number of stakeholders from three continents., and from all levels
(from small local communities to global organization managers), and for
some reason things have proceeded with some stakeholders, and less with
others.

i) now: I'd like to understand if Attivarti.org (or its members in its
"precursor" activities) may

(1) contribute to your initiative with tutorials and, potentially (2) open
a new geospatial lab (to be based in Southern Tuscany).

If this idea is of interest to your initiative, I'll be glad to discuss
this further (probabily on a separate private thread). In any case I
thought it may be of interest also to others to open the discussion with
this message.

Best regards

Andrea Giacomelli
http://www.pibinko.org
http://www.attivarti.org
info at pibinko.org

2015-07-05 10:48 GMT+02:00 Suchith Anand <Suchith.Anand at nottingham.ac.uk>:

> Colleagues,
>
> Last year  at University of Nottingham , i initiated an OpenGIS Mentoring
> Program and funded through the FP7  THE ISSUE  http://www.theissue.eu/ .
> The  mentoring program enabled us to bring in colleagues from other
> organisations to work closely  for short periods at Nottingham for building
> up  collaborations.
>
> Some examples below:
>
>
> ·         The Integration of GIS, Open Source and Sustainability of the
> Environment - Dr Rossella Nocera (University of Molise, Italy) and  Dr
> Teresa Raventos (University of Leicester)
>
> ·         OpenGIS Capacity Building for Local Authorities - Dr Agata
> Ciolkosz-Styk and Pawel Kwiatkowski ((IGiK, Poland) and Fatima Manjra
> (Leicester City Council)
>
>
> Both University of Molise (Italy) and IGIK (Poland) have since then
> expanded their research and teaching in Geospatial Science and now working
> for  establishing Open Source Geospatial Labs. .The mentoring program
> helped us to build long term research collaborations in OpenGIS with the
> participating organisations.  These mentoring programs have been also
> useful to build long term research collaborations with organisations for
> H2020 bids etc.
>
> So i would like all our labs globally to start thinking of this mentoring
> idea to help other universities in your region/country to contact to enable
> mentoring opportunities and future collaborations. So we welcome
> ideas/inputs from all (including those who wish to establish Open Source
> Geospatial Labs) on how we can expand this mentoring idea globally.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Suchith
>
>
>
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