[Ica-osgeo-labs] Helping Nepal with mapping action

[Suchith Anand]

Colleagues,

Thank you for all of you who helped with the mapping efforts for Nepal. From the tweets in Twitter, i understand that Shashish Maharjan (our colleague in Kathmandu University) is safe by God's grace and he and his colleagues are actively involved in the relief efforts.

https://twitter.com/_shashish_

Nepal is an earthquake prone country and one thing i noticed  while going through the blogs of Kathmandu university colleagues at https://geospatiallab.wordpress.com/2015/04/11/twitter-earthquake-hashtag-reporting-simulation-by-geospatial-lab/ , is three weeks back (10th April 2015) they did a simulation to test preparedness for  earthquake in Nepal using social media. 

It is important that for all countries more prepardness is needed for combating natural disasters from earthquakes to flooding to landslides . Especially there is very limited capacity in geospatial technologies  in developing countries as many of the developing counrties do not even have local capacity and or ability to buy expensive properitory GIS software tools needed. That is why is it very important that there is local capacity build in all countries, so that precious lives are saved. So making geospatial education opportunities assessible to all is key long term aim that we all should work together.

I am grateful for the work and relief efforts being done by our colleagues in Nepal in these challenging circumstances and may God help them to help others in need. The knowledge that  thier colleagues globally are thinking and doing whatever they can to support them through mapathons etc will give them the hope and strength.

Suchith
________________________________________
From: Anand Suchith
Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2015 9:36 AM
To: discuss at lists.osgeo.org; ica-osgeo-labs at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Helping Nepal with mapping action

Colleagues,

On behalf of Geo for All  http://www.geoforall.org/  ,i request you all to inform your colleagues and students to contribute in the crisis mapping action launched by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. This will also help teach the students also the real essence of education and humanity and "sharing knowledge and expertise" to help each other in times of need.

We thank our colleagues (esp. Maria Brovelli, Marco Minghini and Giovanna Venuti) and students at GEO Lab in Como (which is one of the GeoForAll Labs) for also organising a mapping  initiative to support the relief efforts.

Details at http://www.polo-como.polimi.it/news/dettaglio-della-news/article/165/helping-nepal-with-a-mapping-action-at-como-campus-967/

The scale of the efforts needed is huge, so more volunteers esp. with FOSS experience in automatic image classification and feature extraction and wish to contribute to the mapping response for the Nepal earthquake are needed . Details at http://opensourcegeospatial.icaci.org/2015/04/mapping-response-contributions-for-nepal/

There are many tasks that need to be accomplished at http://tasks.hotosm.org/

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/2015_Nepal_earthquake

Thanks again for all of you for your support and help with this.

Best wishes,

Suchith




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