CGIAR-CSI 2016

MOTIVATION

A very wide range of technological advances are driving progress across many economic and social enterprise sectors, and agriculture is no exception. The CGIAR is the world’s foremost global research partnership for accelerating sustainable agricultural productivity growth and a globally food-secure future.

Recognizing the need to spur agricultural transformation and smallholder livelihoods through better access to its research, the CGIAR is taking a number of steps to significantly improve the curation, exploitation and dissemination of its research data, findings, and products. These include; the introduction of an Open Access – Open Data (OA-OD) policy in 2013 for which full compliance across all CGIAR centers and programs is set for 2018, the launching of an OA-OD Project to coordinate and support implementation plans and, most recently, the development of a cross-cutting “Big Data & ICT Coordination Platform” proposal, broader in scope but encompassing existing OA-OD goals.

The geospatial science community within CGIAR has a long-established practice of knowledge and data sharing, formalized into the CGIAR’s Consortium for Spatial Information (CGIAR-CSI). The CSIs periodic science meetings have progressively engaged a greater number of non-CGIAR partners and also provided opportunities for training, mentorship and the encouragement of young geospatial scientists from partner countries.

EXPECTATIONS

By the end of meeting on Thursday, we envision to have achieved following three outputs, contributing to the goal of this meeting, Spurring innovation in geospatial contributions to agricultural development:

1. Sharing knowledge on the geospatial technology development in agriculture: Honest, open discussion on what’s new, what’s working (or not), and why that’s important for agricultural development. Inspiring each other in the community. And, make lots of new friends!
2. Defining the role of CGIAR-CSI in a bigger geospatial community: We (geospatial scientists in CGIAR and partners) aspire to be the key technical partner for agricultural development in many new, bigger geospatial technology working groups and initiatives. We’d like to have good ideas and action plans on how we can do this in practice.
3. Building a community-wide consensus on important issues: We will discuss some difficult/critical issues around the broader use of geospatial data and science to support agricultural development, like the ethics/governance, standards/framework, openness, validation, relationship with public-private sectors, etc. Based on the discussion, we will draft a written statement on where we stand and what our guiding principles are.