FGDC personnel
FGDC personnel have conducted training, participated in workshops and related activities or in conjunction with other organizations like the FIG (International Federation of Surveyors), International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS), the International Cartographic Association (ICA), Permanent Committees, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), many UN Organizations, the private sector, and many others.
GSDI Small Grants Program
Background: At roughly the same time the FGDC helped to stand-up the GSDI Association in 2003, the FGDC announced a Small Grants Program designed to help developing nations with emerging SDI programs by providing up to $2,500 USD to organizations that are trying to build and/or implement some component of a NSDI. Together with their own contributions, developing countries can apply for the funding to supports national or sub-national activities that foster partnerships, develop in-country technical capacity, improve data compatibility and access, and increase political support for spatial data infrastructure and earth observations application development. The yearly program generally makes between nine and twelve awards each year.
In 2005, the FGDC was successful in turning the operations of the program to the GSDI Association along with funding hoping that this will help leverage other donors. In addition, URISA’s GISCorps is graciously collaborating with the GSDI to provide in-kind professional GIS services to help with additional grants .
Many of the final reports from completed projects are on the Small Grants web page. The 2013 program is on hold.
Current Information:
GSDI SMALL GRANTS PROGRAM: ACCOMPLISHMENTS OF THE PAST YEAR (April 2013)
During the past year all but two of the 17 projects awarded in 2012 were completed. In addition two projects from the 2011 award year were completed. The results of the projects represent the success of the program to increase the knowledge and deployment of SDIs throughout the international community. Highlights of the GSDI Small Grants Program include
- Hosting numerous workshops to provide training on concepts, exchange ideas, and build relationships for future SDI work in Columbia, Indonesia, Macedonia, Rwanda, South Africa, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe
- Geospatial metadata training, outreach, and generation in Ecuador, Ethiopia, Nigeria
- Activation of a geospatial portal in Ethiopia,
- Expansion of Rwanda’s GeoPortal
- Initialization of a geospatial portal for Zimbabwe
- Hosting of a tri-country (El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua) meeting that resulted in the creation of a steering committee to guide actions needed to complete Gulf of Fonseca Hydrographic Survey and Nautical Charting
- Translation of the “SDI Cookbook” into Albanian
- Establish an encoding standard for Multilingual (four languages) Place Name Database in China
- Improvement of a policy and strategy for the realization of SDI for Tajikistan