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US Agency for International Development

Web-portal to the GISD (Geographic Information for Sustainable Development) alliance and "community of practice" which grew out of multi-partner and inter-agency collaboration focused on the WSSD (World Summit for Sustainable Development) in Johannesburg, August 2002.

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Business Problem

Create a virtual home and collaborative network for GISD--the Geographic Information for Sustainable Development "global alliance". GISD is a USAID-U.S. State Department-led partnership (which rose out of the Johannesburg Summit or WSSD) whose primary goal is to promote and apply a new generation of earth observation data, state-of-the-art geographic information systems-linked technologies, and field-tested geographic knowledge to sustainable development problems in target areas in Africa and elsewhere in Developing countries.

The partnership's focus is on building and promoting Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) in ways that enhances good decision-making, problem-solving, and cooperation among the alliance’s local, national, and global partners. The overarching goal is to better address long-term challenges, such as disaster mitigation, natural resource management, trade competitiveness, and poverty reduction through a more effective use of geospatial tools, data, and related applications. (See: http://www.opengis.org/gisd)

The alliance has also spawned virtual "communities of practice" (CoPs) such as the new USAID Geo-IT CoP (Geographic Information Technologies Community of Practice). See: http://forum.usaid.net/forums/gis/ Geo-IT serves as an online forum and resource for users, producers, and consumers of "GI-Science" tools and technologies within USAID and among its supporters, contractors, partners, and clients worldwide.

Technology Implemented

Create a web-portal that is simple and functional, which accommodates low-bandwidth access by users worldwide, particularly by users in Africa and Latin America. The site needed to provide basic capacity for posting documents, uploading presentations and files, carrying out virtual discussions, setting-up email lists, and providing an extensive "contacts" database of all the members in this extended virtual community. The OpenGIS Consortium built and managed the website following latest protocols.

Development Team Biography

The OpenGIS Consortium (OGC) team led by Mark Reichardt and Sam Bacharach and others at the OGC office in Bloomington, Indiana managed the website. Primary content submission and editing was provided by Robert Ford (USAID), Fernando Echavarria (U.S. State Department), Marleni Ramirez (State Department) and Kate Lance (USGS-EROS). Scores of GISD participants around the world submitted documents, reports, web-resources - see: http://www.opengis.org/gisd

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