Invitation to the Interest Group in Agricultural Data (IGAD) Pre-Meeting P12 in Gaborone, Botswana

Interested e-Agriculture CoP members are invited to the Botswana Research Data Alliance (RDA) Interest Group on Agricultural Data (IGAD) meeting in Gaborone, Botswana on the 5 -6th of November 2018. The Theme of the meeting is "Data Collection in Africa: State of the Art, Challenges and Solutions"

Overview of the events

On November 5, the IGAD community members will organize a one-day meeting dedicated to the theme “How agriculture in Africa can benefit from data collection”. During this day, IGAD would like (i) to explore data collection practices in Africa and challenges associated to it; (ii) to discuss possible benefits of data collection for farmers and (iii) to share straightforward and low cost data collection methods.

November 6 will be dedicated to a GODAN Action Workshop associated to IGAD. Open data can benefit a great variety of actors tackling food security and nutrition challenges in developing countries. However, the full realisation of these opportunities requires insights in how to close the digital divide between open data and the potential users.

GODAN Action therefore is an innovative project researching and making practical application of its findings to enable effective use of open data in agriculture and nutrition.

The project explores three work streams:

1.  improving knowledge and capacity on (usage of) standards, by providers and intermediaries;
2. understanding impact, to be able to efficiently monitor and measure impact and to be able to improve the potential impact of new initiatives;
3. capacity building as a mechanism to leverage and extend the potential of networks.

The project has set up a programme to build the capacity of potential stakeholders to both understand the potential of open data for agriculture and nutrition and to engage with it practically.

Would you like to attend and/or active participate in these events? Please write an e-mail to [email protected].

Background to IGAD

The Interest Group on Agricultural Data (IGAD) of the RDA was formed in 2013 and since its inception has grown in community strength to over 200 members, becoming one of the RDA’s most prominent Thematic Groups. IGAD is a domain-oriented group working on all issues related to global agriculture data. It represents stakeholders in managing data for agricultural research and innovation, including producing, aggregating and consuming data.

Beyond this IGAD promotes good practices in research with regard data sharing policies, data management plans, and data interoperability, and it is a forum for sharing experience and providing visibility to research and work in agricultural data.

One of IGAD’s main roles is to serve as a platform that leads to the creation of domain-specific Working Groups. To date, four successful Working Groups (WGs) have been formed under IGAD, these are: Wheat Data Interoperability, Rice Data Interoperability, AgriSemantics and On-Farm Data Sharing WGs. All groups played an active role at the last RDA Plenaries, in Montreal (Canada) and Barcelona (Spain).

Objectives of IGAD

• To promote good practices in the research domain: data sharing policies, data management plan, data interoperability,
• To provide a platform for networking and cross-fertilization of research ideas in data management and interoperability,
• To solicit and promote interactions and projects among the major international institutions and groups worldwide which work on agricultural research and innovation,
• To achieve data interoperability

More information here