Africangeogeek, spatial geekery in Africa

African Spatialist and geek to the core

Mimi hapa,

These are the thoughts of an African spatialist and geo geek..thoughts on maps, mapping api's, open source gis tools and development frameworks

Well, Kenya is positioning itself to be one of the worlds major ICT hubs in Africa. The ministry of Information and communication are busy trying to get Kenyans to create content. Well this being a spatialists blog we also need to look at geo-content. Well does Kenya publish alot of geo-content. To my surprise, Kenya has a lot of geo content, only that it is in the hands of either organisations or government. We all know how organisations are not ready to part with some of the content they created. But then came the idea why not release the content, but under a licensce where a revenue sharing model is agreed upon?

The Kenya National Spatial Data Infrastructure has alot of data, but holding on to it. I think it is our right to access government data, spatial data for that matter. Unless it is information on Abdul Faizal. On realeasing such data, people come up with innovations on how to use the data, and thus commercializing up to the extent of covering the initial mapping costs?

Well i can say that Kenya has had a good 2009 in terms of Spatial developemt.In April we had Wherecamp Africa then Google also had the Google Earth Outreach training in Novemeber. We also had the Map Kibera project. The Africa GIS event though not in Kenya , i think was very successful and good for the continent. Ushahidi is also putting Africa on the map. All in all 2010 will be a year to watch.

You may be asking, what the heck will africangeogeek be doing? well currently i am working on a mapping aspect of Drumnet. It isĀ  done. This year i will release some two spatial applications. I am not telling what they do? Both are in progress and will soon be calling upon beta testers.. watch this space.. 2010 is the year,.

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