September, 16-17 2015, Addis Ababa (ILRI campus) [Click here for the final programme].
Summary:
The OpenWater 2015 symposium received more than 127 abstracts of which 50 workshop abstracts were accepted as oral presentations and 11 as Poster displays. A total of 120 participants attended the OpenWater 2015 symposium and Workshops, 16-17 September, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Outcomes of the workshops included:
- Involve more the private sector on the OpenWater Symposium;
- Raise awareness at the global level to stimulate the use of the FOSS;
- Support the OpenWater Community Development Network (CDN) and connect resources to the people who need them (e.g social media);
- Make available the Abstracts & ppt’s of all OpenWater Symposium;
- Seek fund raising for supporting (make sustainable) Start-ups of new Water Open Source initiatives;
- Next OpenWater Symposium will take place in 2017.
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Background:
The OpenWater symposium aims at sharing experiences, tools, training materials and model codes applicable in the water domain. Several open source tools are emerging and initiatives are currently taken to initiate open standards and interfaces.
OpenWater has been organised as a series of invited presentations, dedicated workshops, demos and oral / poster presentations in the following fields:
• Interoperability and standards in the water domain;
• Repositories and SDI’s;
• Open source developments in water science;
• Open hardware;
• Open acces training materials;
• Environmental modelling using open source tools;
• Crowd sourcing.
Open source tools are seen as important to both research and practice in the management of water resources. Tools and models provide researchers and planners with the ability to improve the management of the water resources. In Africa, this capacity for assessment and planning are becoming all the more critical with increased demands on water from agriculture, industry and a growing population, as well as concerns over potential impact of climate change, declining water quality, and environmental impact of commercial farming and urbanization. However, most African researcher institutions and development implementing agencies and organizations are unable to access many of the tools available that would enable them to conduct effective research for analysis and planning. In addition, the capacity to use existing tools is also low. At the same time, new tools are being developed to be accessible to all – open source tools. While this offers promise for users in Africa, these users remain largely disconnected from developers. The disconnects is leading to a lack of awareness of tools available, continued low capacity on how to use the tools, and at times, mismatch between the tools developed and what is needed to optimise the use of water in relation to environmental protection, food security, energy protections and many other demands. By organising the 3rd OpenWater symposium in Africa, we hope to highlight models and tools that are overcoming existing gaps in water management, such as with gender and nutrition balances. [Click here for the final programme]
Targeted audience:
• Developers and providers of open source tools in the water domain from all over the globe;
• Users of open source tools for water resources management in Africa;
• Academics and students doing research using open source tools in Africa.
During the Pre-OpenWater 2015 symposium series of training took place on the 14-15 September 2015 at the same venue [Click here for more information]
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