Mainstreaming Spatial Data Infrastructure
WSIS
Recognizing the importance of the revolution in Information and Communica-tion Technologies as a means of shaping the future of the world and in achieving the Millennium Development Goals, world leaders decided that a global vision and a global dialogue were needed to build the framework of an all-inclusive and equitable Information Society. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) adopted a resolution at its Plenipotentiary Conference in Minneapolis in 1998 to hold a World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and to place it on the agenda of the United Nations.
In 2001, the ITU Council decided to hold the Summit in two phases, the first from 10 to 12 December 2003, in Geneva, Switzerland, and the second from 16 to 18 November 2005 in Tunis, Tunisia. This was endorsed by the UN General Assembly while according the lead role for the preparatory work to ITU in cooperation with other interested organizations and partners. The first WSIS phase laid the foundations of the Information Society by agreeing to a Declaration of Principles and a concrete Plan of Action. The second phase will review the implementation of the Action Plan and set targets for 2005-2015.
In preparation for the Tunis phase of the WSIS, several WSIS regional and thematic conferences were held in different regions of the world. One such regional conference was the Pan-Arab Regional Conference on WSIS, held in Cairo,
between June 16 and 18 of 2003. The purpose was to activate the strategies and objectives approved by Arab leaders in an earlier Arab Strategy Summit held in Amman in 2001. The report "Towards an Arab Information Society: A Framework for Collaborative Action", approved in Cairo, presents the broad policy lines, themes and axes of collaborative action required to contribute effectively to the global information society. The report recognizes that the Arab Middle East is a very dynamic area, with countries in various stages of development. While the average overall teledensity is 7.6% and penetration levels of the personal computer and the Internet are very low, yet, the region is one of the few remaining regions in the world with high growth potential.
According to this report, common issues impeding growth, include the high cost of internet connections and bandwidth, lack of Arabic content on the Web, perceived threats to national security and regional culture, and market fragmentation. These issues, in addition to the regulatory harmonization needed to facilitate regional integration, are considered essential. Addressing them would require collective efforts and cooperation at all levels between governments, industrialists, businessmen, and non-governmental organizations in the Arab region.
A key theme highlighted in this report is "Planning for Integration and Building a Regional Information Infrastructure". The report admits that although the time may not yet have come for consumers and businesses to enjoy the benefits of broadband transmission in most of the Arab region, the convergence among broadcast, voice, and data exchange, including the Internet, has become a reality in many
regions. Recommended actions include conducting adequate studies to assess the current national situations in the Arab
region in terms of communication infrastructure and to ensure identification of transition steps to a broadband telecommunications infrastructure in future.
Three strategies for
mainstreaming SDI
1st Strategy: Communicating SDI through WSIS channels. The WSIS Stocktaking activity is intended to fulfill the dual purpose of providing an inventory of activities undertaken by governments and all stakeholders in implementing the Geneva decisions (WSIS Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action) and of taking stock of the progress made in building the Information Society. The WSIS stocktaking exercise was launched by the WSIS Executive Secretariat in October 2004. Following an initial brainstorming meeting of stakeholders, an online consultation and discussions within the WSIS Bureau on the form the stocktaking should take, a questionnaire was developed, sent to all stakeholders and posted online. On the basis of the response
received to date, a searchable database of WSIS-related activities has been created and is publicly accessible. The database contains details of over 1600 WSIS-related activities.
For example, Oman has started implementing the "Digital Oman Society and e-Government Strategy," which includes streamlining government services, providing youth employment, improving education, enabling knowledge-based industries, supporting a competitive environment, etc. It reflects the adoption and
integration of digital technology at home, at work and in places of education and recreation. Another example is Egypt. Egypt has carried out the Free Internet Initiative through a public-private partnership to achieve the goal of encouraging private investment in the deployment of infrastructure and provision of services. The "Free Internet" is essentially a pay-as-you-go connectivity scheme, with the cost of Internet dial-up being
included in the local telephone call. The
initiative provides users with complete flexibility and choice.
SDI initiatives are conspicuously absent from the WSIS Stocktaking database. The glaring absence of SDI and Geographic Information from the WSIS debate is alarming considering that the geoinformation community religiously believes that GIS is an evolving nervous system for our planet, able to take the pulse of the earth! Hence a first strategy for mainstreaming SDI should be a
sustained campaign to place Geographic Information and SDI on the WSIS radar, by adding SDI initiatives to the WSIS Stocktaking database and by persuading WSIS national delegates and WSIS audiences in regional and thematic conferences to demand the ability to tap into the information resources being gathered by the geoinformation community.
2nd Strategy: Operational Research on Capacity Development. Nowadays, the content of university courses in the field of geoinformatics is increasingly
organized around the concept of Spatial Data Infrastructure. Education, the traditional mechanism for content transfer to individuals, is now also considered inadequate by researchers and donors. Instead, it is argued that the concept of "capacity development" at a systemic, organizational and individual level is more appropriate in developing nations. "SDI" and "capacity development" are complex and fuzzy. The difficulty of applying the complex and often unclear concept of
capacity development to the evolving and often unclear concept of SDI poses a considerable challenge.
Therefore, a second strategy should
involve the assessment of individual,
organizational and systemic SDI capacity development in Arab nations, in harmony with the key theme of "Planning for Integration and Building a Regional Information Infrastructure" and the recommended action to "conduct adequate studies to assess the current national situations in the Arab region in terms of communication infrastructure".
A useful conceptual framework for this purpose is the Capacity Development Indicator (CDI) framework developed by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). UNDP has been
involved in capacity development and
capacity assessment at both the global level and on the ground in over 130 countries. At the global level, UNDP plays a key role as a forum for intellectual debate, facilitating discussion and advancing the collective understanding of capacity
development. At the country level, UNDP is supporting thousands of
projects developing and assessing capacity. This unparalleled on the ground experience grounds UNDP's academic output and reinforces its status as the global leader in capacity development.
Key concepts and tools of the UNDP Capacity Development Indicator framework include the three-tier structure of capacity assessment (systemic, organizational and individual), five strategic areas of support and a qualitative (scorecard) approach for capacity self-assessment . The UNDP concepts and tools, with some adaptations, have the potential to provide the backbone for an operational research program at a national and supranational level, to self-assess and compare across nations the systemic, organizational and individual capacity for the establishment and management of SDI. The result of such operational research would constitute a thermometer reading of sorts that can help determine the
required mix of capacity development
interventions (i.e. information dissemination, short courses and joint research) and can help spread scarce resources judiciously across nations in the region.