During this year World Commons Week,  there were a multitude of local events organized in different parts of the world all dedicated to raising awareness about the scholarship and practice of the Commons in many thematic areas, including water, forests, fisheries and marine settings; the global atmosphere; infrastructure, urban and rural areas; technology and software; and knowledge sharing and co-production. One of these event was a webinar analyzing the contributions of GeoForAll to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Photo by UNSPLASH licensed under CC0 License

Why this webinar?

Access to quality education and digital economy opportunities is key for getting rid of extreme poverty and enable broadly shared prosperity for all. “GeoForAll” is the Open Source Geospatial Foundation’s Education initiative with various partners worldwide in their mission for making geospatial education and digital economy opportunities accessible to all.

By combining the potential of free and open geospatial software, open data, open standards and open access to research publications will enable the creation of a sustainable innovation ecosystem for helping solve global cross disciplinary societal challenges from climate change mitigation to zero hunger. Service for the benefit and betterment of humanity is a key fundamental principle of GeoForAll, this will contribute and focus its efforts for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial has now made it possible for a large number of  government organisations, private companies and academics in both developed and developing countries to make use of geospatial software in many application domains. This will ensure that geo education and geo digital economy opportunities are also available to economically poor countries and economically poor people worldwide. 

Central to “Geo for All” mission is the belief that knowledge is a public good and Open Principles in Education will enable broadly shared prosperity for all.

Among the speakers, Sergio Acosta y Lara (Dirección Nacional de Topografía, Ministerio de Transporte y Obras Públicas, Uruguay) that shared his experiences from the 3rd edition of the course-contest Projects with students and gvSIG Batoví. a successful initiative that helps us understand why scalability and costs for scaling is fundamental. Through their focus on Open Principles in Education they have now provided high quality spatial education to students in all schools across Uruguay.

Victor Sunday (Director, Unique Mappers Team) presented their very inspirational work on youth and women empowerment in Africa. GeoForAll is working closely with YouthMappers and other partners worldwide to help provide geoeducation opportunities for all students.

• While Cameron Green (University of Pretoria) highlighted the importance of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) and the fundamental link of SDI to all 17 UN SDGs, above all how many developing countries cannot evaluate and monitor SDGs due to the lack of Spatial Data infrastructures.

Please find below the recording of the webinar, held on 10 October.