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The MAPME Initiative: Leveraging the power of open data and FOSS GIS to improve public expenditure in the development aid sector.

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The MAPME Initiative: Leveraging the power of open data and FOSS GIS to improve public expenditure in the development aid sector.
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351
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CC Attribution 3.0 Unported:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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Production Year2022

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MAps for Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (MAPME) is an initiative founded by Geo-geeks and FOSS enthusiasts from KfW Development Bank (KfW), French Development Agency (AFD) and MapTailor Geospatial Consultants. Aid agencies such as KfW and AFD financially assist developing countries in fighting hunger, poverty, disease, illiteracy and environmental degradation around the world. Together with our partner countries we are key decision makers in the allocation of the so-called Official Development Assistance (ODA). KfW, for example, allocated 12.4 bn. EUR to assist developing countries achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2020. Geodata and geospatial technologies help us to take informed decisions to allocate funds responsibly and maximize public goods and benefits. Nevertheless, the uptake of open data and geospatial technologies within our institutions and decision-making processes is still relatively low. We think that one of the main reasons for this is missing openness in the way that we deal with data-analytic questions in our institutions. In response we founded MAPME, an open community and open-source initiative to upscale and democratize the usage of geodata and geo-spatial technologies within our own institutions as well as our partners. With this initiative we promote cultural change in our institutions by prototyping small FOSS and open-data pilot projects that illustrate the power and usefulness of these technologies to improve development aid projects. One of our outputs is the mapme.biodiversity package, which offers R-users the possibility to automatically download and process several important open-data sources for conservation science using a parallelization approach to deal with large AOIs or global conservation portfolios (github.com/mapme-initiative/mapme.biodiversity). We will offer a talk where we share our approach to FOSS application and development, what we see as barriers in our institutional and IT contexts and first successes stories that leveraged the power of geospatial data for learning about our projects and taking more informed decisions.
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Numbering schemeOpen sourceData modelGoodness of fitProjective planeDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Data structureOpen sourceRight angleEndliche ModelltheorieComputer animation
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
So, first of all, thank you very much everybody for still being here. It's 5.30, it's hot and the jazz music is already playing outside, so I really appreciate that you're still here. If the music plays again, maybe I start to sing, or maybe don't, you don't want to hear that.
So better, I will start my talk about an initiative that we kind of funded to leverage the power of open data and force GIS to improve expenditure in the development cooperation sector. My name is Johannes Schieler and I work for KFW Development Bank. What do we do in development cooperation?
Well, we are not driven by profit, we provide financial and technical assistance to developing countries. So I work in a bank, we provide loans and grants to achieve the SDGs, basically. So we finance projects and my colleague, Gunner, who's from GISat in the back, they are trying to provide technical information to improve projects.
And we are guided, or should be guided, by the principles of digital development. So one of these principles is to use open standards, open data, and so on. You know these topics. And it's very hard to implement that in our institutions, to be honest, and we are just taking the first steps, because our institutions so far have worked very differently as public institutions. So our goal is to increase our capacities and get these things going.
Why do we use geodata for our projects, or why is it interesting? Well, from geodata you can derive a lot of information that we cannot get from our projects. So you can see our normal project data collection here. We start at the beginning of the project. If we are lucky, oftentimes people don't collect data at the beginning of the project.
And then you cannot draw a conclusion what really happened on the ground and whether we achieve impacts. For example, in the conservation sector. Geodata provides us the opportunity to use data in the planning phase already during monitoring and also evaluation. So now the music is starting.
I'm not going to make it true on my promise. We have two projects that we already open sourced. One is called Oscar. It's a web platform for health services in Nepal. And the nice thing about it is that it's scaled out now for other countries. So it's kind of a proof of concept that if you produce an open source solution, you
can reutilize it. And then we have produced a package. It's called the MapMe Biodiversity package, which kind of helps you to do conservation analysis. So it kind of processes a lot of conservation data sets automatically, downloads the data, processes it.
And it's very efficient because it applies parallelization strategies. And it's mainly targeted at its analysts. So we use it ourselves, but we also provide it to the public. One of the things that we can put out from this package, for example, is this kind of analysis where we assess the threat levels in protected areas in our partnering countries.
And we cannot only clearly spot where the hotspots of forest cover loss is and where we should engage more. But we can also map that to our portfolio and then try to engage in those areas that are most urgently in need and where we are currently not active. Yeah, one of the challenges that we face, and I think a lot of open source initiatives
and projects face those challenges, is how do we find a sustainable governance structure or model, right? And the way that we are approaching it right now in our institutions with different projects is this so-called concept of public goods. So here we're talking about digital public goods, but you can think of public goods as anything that the government can provide and that should serve everybody's needs.
But it's a very adventurous way, and I would be very happy to talk to others about their experience, how to, yeah, govern these projects and find more sustainability. Thank you very much.