Colleagues, Thank you for all of you who helped with the mapping efforts for Nepal. From the tweets in Twitter, i understand that Shashish Maharjan (our colleague in Kathmandu University) is safe by God's grace and he and his colleagues are actively involved in the relief efforts.
https://twitter.com/_shashish_ Nepal is an earthquake prone country and one thing i noticed while going through the blogs of Kathmandu university colleagues at https://geospatiallab.wordpress.com/2015/04/11/twitter-earthquake-hashtag-reporting-simulation-by-geospatial-lab/ , is three weeks back (10th April 2015) they did a simulation to test preparedness for earthquake in Nepal using social media. It is important that for all countries more prepardness is needed for combating natural disasters from earthquakes to flooding to landslides . Especially there is very limited capacity in geospatial technologies in developing countries as many of the developing counrties do not even have local capacity and or ability to buy expensive properitory GIS software tools needed. That is why is it very important that there is local capacity build in all countries, so that precious lives are saved. So making geospatial education opportunities assessible to all is key long term aim that we all should work together. I am grateful for the work and relief efforts being done by our colleagues in Nepal in these challenging circumstances and may God help them to help others in need. The knowledge that thier colleagues globally are thinking and doing whatever they can to support them through mapathons etc will give them the hope and strength. Suchith ________________________________________ From: Anand Suchith Sent: Tuesday, April 28, 2015 9:36 AM To: discuss@lists.osgeo.org; ica-osgeo-l...@lists.osgeo.org Subject: Helping Nepal with mapping action Colleagues, On behalf of Geo for All http://www.geoforall.org/ ,i request you all to inform your colleagues and students to contribute in the crisis mapping action launched by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. This will also help teach the students also the real essence of education and humanity and "sharing knowledge and expertise" to help each other in times of need. We thank our colleagues (esp. Maria Brovelli, Marco Minghini and Giovanna Venuti) and students at GEO Lab in Como (which is one of the GeoForAll Labs) for also organising a mapping initiative to support the relief efforts. Details at http://www.polo-como.polimi.it/news/dettaglio-della-news/article/165/helping-nepal-with-a-mapping-action-at-como-campus-967/ The scale of the efforts needed is huge, so more volunteers esp. with FOSS experience in automatic image classification and feature extraction and wish to contribute to the mapping response for the Nepal earthquake are needed . Details at http://opensourcegeospatial.icaci.org/2015/04/mapping-response-contributions-for-nepal/ There are many tasks that need to be accomplished at http://tasks.hotosm.org/ http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/2015_Nepal_earthquake Thanks again for all of you for your support and help with this. Best wishes, Suchith This message and any attachment are intended solely for the addressee and may contain confidential information. If you have received this message in error, please send it back to me, and immediately delete it. Please do not use, copy or disclose the information contained in this message or in any attachment. Any views or opinions expressed by the author of this email do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Nottingham. This message has been checked for viruses but the contents of an attachment may still contain software viruses which could damage your computer system, you are advised to perform your own checks. Email communications with the University of Nottingham may be monitored as permitted by UK legislation. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss