Welcome to GECO, the Geospatial Enablement and Community Outreach blog.
Note: this is a draft of a proposal that is taking shape. Please use tag #jiscGECO to comment…
Aims, Objectives and Final Output from GECO
The overarching purpose of GECO is to foster a community(ies) of users of geospatial resources (data, services, support). Geospatial, taken in its broadest sense underpins a vast array of academic endeavour – geography represents a fundamental organising axis for information. Space (and time) are fundamental aspects of most resources and activities and the purpose of GECO is to help:
- foster self-help within identifiable communities of interest that emerge form the recent JISC 15/10 funding call (in the Call itself this is referred to as ‘Community Synthesis’;
- increase the use of geospatial tools, infrastructure (data and services) and information for the wider benefit of the teaching, learning and research communities;
- to collate exemplars of use and to establish a trajectory for the future embedding of geospatial resources within research, teaching and learning landscapes;
- to identify and promote best practice (such as standards, interoperability, machine interfaces) and to provide a means for knowledge transfer from specialist to less spatially literate users and domains;
- assist with the maturation of the UK academic Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) and ensure
Graphical depiction of what an SDI is.
that location (space/geography) is championed across sectoral domains.
- Promote the JISC Geospatial Working Group’s (GWG) Vision for geospatial resources in UK higher and further education.
- Champion awareness raising of INSPIRE (summary 2 pager here), ensuring that the sector is cognisant of the obligations and opportunities that this gives rise to.
- Promote good data management principles, including data curation and stewardship ensuring transparency and reuse where practicable.
At the conclusion of the project we anticipate:
- The establishment of a nexus of (largely) self-sustaining communities that exploit geospatial information within a particular domain.
- Greater awareness of existing JISC investment in geospatial resources and a higher degree of awareness of key policy areas such as INSPIRE.
- Additional services and data with exemplar usage and best practice guidance.
One Response to “Post the First – Aims, Objectives and Final Output from GECO”
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Great start James, really like the wording and priority of objectives as they are listed. I’d like us also to recognise that we don’t want to necessarily create (from scratch) “a geo community” but rather, append the already active community out there, the sustainability strategy for this work needs to be that the jiscGEO projects (as well as those in other cross discipline areas working in Academia) will want to actively participate in communities like open street map or wherecamp? Don’t know if we can shoe horn that in to this post (maybe one of the later project plan posts?) as I like the simplicity of the way it reads for the community now. Might add a couple of pictures or quick back of the napkin drawings (always fun to look back on the start of the proeject at the end and see where the trajectory took us :).