[Geo4All] UN SDG mapping book updates

[Anthony Robinson]

Suchith,

One way to approach this situation is to treat it as a conflict. Another way 
to approach this situation is to treat it like an opportunity for mutually 
beneficial collaboration.

Is it necessarily true that any book published by Esri Press must 
necessarily be "against the spirit of openness in geo education"? I'm not 
sure how you can make that judgment before anything's even been written, let 
alone published. And how would it be "neutral" for the ICA to obey your 
directive and not ever collaborate with proprietary vendors? Did you know 
that Esri Press publishes the Semiology of Graphics, along with quite a few 
other titles that don't even talk about software?

The ICA book effort will involve the collective work of dozens of ICA 
commissions with the idea of showing how maps can truly matter for global 
problems. I know you don't believe it's possible, but consider that Esri and 
other companies may in fact actually care about global problems and be 
working to solve them. It's possible to run a business that makes money and 
also be a good citizen. Also consider that ICA represents cartographers 
around the world. Most of those cartographers have jobs in a wide range of 
settings, including in for-profit companies. A GeoForAll MOU doesn't prevent 
ICA from doing things that GeoForAll doesn't love.

Once again I feel like the GeoForAll effort is hampered by a strict dogma 
that tests every geospatial initiative with a purity evaluation that 
virtually nothing will be able to meet. And once again it's an argument 
against doing something with no proposed viable alternative.

Finally, I'll add that I think it is quite problematic that there appears to 
be no collaborative decision making process by which GeoForAll speaks out on 
issues like this one. If I'm wrong about that I'd be happy to be corrected.

Regards,

-Anthony

Anthony C. Robinson, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Geography
Director for Online Geospatial Education, John A. Dutton e-Education 
Institute
Assistant Director, GeoVISTA Center
The Pennsylvania State University
sites.psu.edu/arobinson/



-----Original Message-----
From: GeoForAll [mailto:geoforall-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of 
Suchith Anand
Sent: Friday, June 2, 2017 9:39 AM
To: geoforall at lists.osgeo.org; m.j.kraak at utwente.nl; sg at icaci.org
Subject: [Geo4All] UN SDG mapping book updates

Dear  colleagues,

As you are aware there is some excellent work done by our ICA colleagues by 
highlighting the value of cartography by “mapping” the UN sustainable 
development goals. Silvana and our colleagues have done excellent work 
highlighting the importance of openness in reducing inequalities.

I believe this is a very important activity  but recently  I came to know 
that the book  proposal that is planned  to be developed from this is being 
planned to be published through a properitery GIS vendor ‘s publishing 
house. Hence I have written to Menno-Jan requesting him to consider 
publication on this important issue through  any neutral academic publishing 
houses as publishing this through properitery GIS vendor ‘s publishing 
company is against the spirit of openness in geo education and ICA-OSGeo MoU 
.  I think it is important to have both properitery and open solutions but 
ICA as an organisation should be neutral . Hence very important not to 
promote Properitery vendor agenda esp in UN SDG work by having the 
properitery GIS vendor publishing this. As an ordinary ICA volunteer  I am 
disappointed to see this.  I am grateful that Menno-Jan has understood my 
concern and I hope this will be rectified asap.

I will keep you updated on the developments.

Best wishes,

Suchith







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