United Nations Explores GeoAcademy Curriculum with Help from Geo for All
Two weeks ago news
crossed my desk describing uptake of the
GeoAcademy curriculum for training UN staff in its move from proprietary to open source GIS. Maria Antonia Brovelli, Vice Rector for Como Campus and GIS Professor, Politecnico di Milano who leads a UN capacity building working group, which has support from
Geo for All volunteers, made a statement.
...a voluntary team of people of our GEO4ALL network are working in a capacity building project related to a migration of UN staff from proprietary to OS software. The team revised the tutorial and will start the first experiment with the QGIS GeoAcademy tutorial.
I contacted Brovelli to get some context. She explained that the "UN OpenGIS Initiative aims at developing an enterprise GIS system using free and open source geospatial solutions in support of UN Peace Operations." The Geo for All volunteers are working to provide "suitable training packages for UN staff on open source geospatial technologies." The news, then, is about the first step in this capacity building:
As the first step, it was decided to conduct training program as a virtual class for UN Staff, which is an on-line course as self-training with the help of G4A tutors, using some free and open source selected tutorials. The virtual class training courses will cover various subjects such as QGIS, PostGIS, GeoNode, GeoServer and OpenLayers. UN Staff will directly access training material through the free and open source ‘Beep Platform’ of Politecnico di Milano and could also be communicated with Tutors. The first course for the virtual class is chosen for QGIS GeoAcademy. The virtual class will be started in the second half of September 2016.
