Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Day 6 – “Your Geospatial Data is a National Asset”



Forgive my title of the technical jargon but it was the quote of the day to encourage among my fellow colleagues. Today it was a gorgeous 75 degrees with full sun and I got outside a bit more than normal as we had lunch in the gardens and I took my peers to training in amongst the trees of the grounds as we continued our work towards an Ethiopia National Geospatial Data Infrastructure. 

We did most of our work today thinking about the most important core themes to propose to the concept Federal Data Geographic Committee. I lectured and then had members build consensus and conversation about the most important core themes. It was another engaging exercise as it was the second day that - when lunch was called, most people just wanted to keep on working. That was enjoyable to see and I think a nice possible model for success – conference attendees typically want things to end as soon as possible to get to the more fun stuff.




After a wonderful lunch discussing the food system in the United States, which I am quite opinionated and passionate about, Johnathan engaged them in an excellent exercise to continue the leadership and collaboration.  Here are few shots of the teamwork developing:






To develop deeper ideas about metadata, I gave our participants several tasks on data collection and documentation. Although somewhat simplistic in design, it offered us a chance to have a conversation of consequence about documentation and potential standards in the data collection process as well as a conversation about projections and datums in much more deep ways than they anticipated.



The new light rail line going in

A Bus for my colleague Mike (9.011202,38.762843), looking to the east

Our evening ended with a wonderful conversation over dinner with the Deputy Director of the Ethiopian Mapping Agency at a cool restaurant started by an Ethiopian who lived in the Great White North for 15 years before coming home – the name of the restaurant – Oh Canada!  

http://addisfortune.net/articles/oh-canada/    - I had the Ottawa Senators Cheese Burger. It was so great!

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