SOB Willy Franck
Willy Franck SOB is the CEO of SOGEFI, a company specialized in geospatial and land management. He is passionate about the implementation of open source location intelligence platforms in developing countries. He is an active member in the OpenStreetMap Community with which he created GeOsm, a key infrastructure of developing countries digital transformation. His expertise is recognised by several international institutions(The World Bank, GIZ, UNESCO, UN-Habitat, AFD, etc.),
Sessions
This session is the founding General Assembly of the OpenStreetMap Africa association. Some background:
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OSM Africa, as it currently stands, is great, however, it will be very difficult for us to have a significant and organized impact on the state of business on the continent. Our strong current activity is the #SOTMAfrica conference currently being organized.
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The biggest challenge for OSM Africa at the moment is the absence of a dedicated steering committee, committed to driving the ideas discussed. What we have now is a kind of ad hoc committee, making things work. We don't think this is sustainable.
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A Constitutive General Assembly should enable a Committee to be set up to take this idea forward with a roadmap so that activities can start in 2024.
GeOsm is a Free and Open Geospatial Knowledge Infrastructure operating on a global scale aiming to bring together, on a single platform , free geographic information of each country and pursue the objective of empowering local communities and unlocking their potential. On the one hand by ensuring a knowledge/visualization of existing data and on the other hand by allowing spatial dialogue between stakeholders around the territory through a located social network.
HOT and GeoSM Family signed a Memorandum of Understanding in November 2022 in which both parties, having understood the need to improve location data for decision-making, intend to work together to support both the WNAH Hub and GeoSM Family's missions, particularly with the aim of ensuring up-to-date, high-quality geospatial data, visualization and digital community building and engagement through online tools and development initiatives. Today, GeoSM Family wishes to work in collaboration with key national and international partners in Africa and beyond to execute activities through formal agreements. These activities will include, but are not limited to, community building, open and participatory mapping, software development, data cleansing and uploading to OSM, training local partners in GeOSM, organizing webinars, user testing, workshops, mapathons and more.
The aim of this session is to present the new version of geosm, train communities in its use, receive feedback and formalize partnership agreements between geOsm Family and local communities attending SOTM Africa.