ISPRS-Archives The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences ISPRS-Archives Int. Arch. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci. 2194-9034 Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/isprs-archives-XLII-4-W14-49-2019 OSGEO UN COMMITTEE EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGE: A USE CASE OF SHARING SOFTWARE AND EXPERIENCE FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD Franceschi S. 1 Adoch K. 2 Kang H. K. 3 Hupy C. 4 Coetzee S. 5 Brovelli M. A. 6 HydroloGIS srl, Bolzano, Italy Mara Arwot GeoSpatial, Kampala, Uganda Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements, Republic of Korea Hupy UAS LLC, Indiana, USA Centre for Geoinformation Science, Department of Geography, Geoinformatics and Meteorology, University of Pretoria, South Africa Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Italy 23 08 2019 XLII-4/W14 49 55 Copyright: © 2019 S. Franceschi et al. 2019 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is available from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLII-4-W14/49/2019/isprs-archives-XLII-4-W14-49-2019.html The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://isprs-archives.copernicus.org/articles/XLII-4-W14/49/2019/isprs-archives-XLII-4-W14-49-2019.pdf

The paper presents the outcomes of an Educational Challenge launched by the OSGeo (Open Source Geospatial Foundation) United Nations (UN) Committee in 2018. The Committee promotes the development and use of open source software that meets UN needs and supports the aims of the UN. The Challenge supported the UN OpenGIS Initiative, a project “... to identify and develop an Open Source GIS bundle that meets the requirements of UN operations, taking full advantage of the expertise of mission partners including partner nations, technology contributing countries, international organizations, academia, NGOs, private sector”. The UN OpenGIS Initiative is organized into working groups, called ‘Spirals’. The OSGeo UN Challenge called for the development of training material that can be used for training UN staff working on Spirals 1 and 3. Spiral 1 focuses on a new open source web platform for data collection and Spiral 3 is related to new functionalities needed by UN staff during their field operations. The material developed for the challenges is now openly available for anybody, reaching a wider audience than only UN staff members. This paper describes the challenges and the training material developed for them. Expertise from all over the world was pulled together in designing, mentoring and developing the material.