Thoughts of a minibus traveller

The CEO of Brainstreet, Lance was just appointed to the board of the Guyana Energy Agency so the ICT conversation with the three people who were there at 130pm started off with renewable energy, possibilities, problems and the fact that Guyana has 5 hours of direct light on average a day and other things. Vijay Datadin  led the discussion. His Presentation was designed for people who work in IT and are now becoming familiar with Geographic Information System (GIS) concepts. GIS applications present spatial data in a visual way.    Vijay looked at the opportunity for GIS , using the model shown here. The Hardware available now extends to smart phones, hand held GPS. The G IS day activities helped to raise awareness . The Software available has been expanded with the use of FOSS 4 GIS.  The conversation included the need for the policy and standards, the move to Open Data in a culture which did not rapidly share data; socialism and the use of old Ge...

The participants at the last Software Freedom Day had agreed to keep the conversation going about Guyana and the use of Information and Communications Technologies. Bhoojnarine Hemchand did not know that Estonians apparently have a " deep abiding love for trees." He had visited as part of an OAS workshop since Estonia has become a benchmark in terms of how it uses IT. Estonia gained independence from the Soviet Union 1994 independence - they realised that using Information Technology was critical to development of the country. Estonia is now one of the most 'wired' countries in the world and is an example to other countries wishing to develop similar infrastructure and services. Some of the lessons for Guyana which I gathered are :- There was a vision - a woman in a forest looking for mushrooms and needing reliable information about the correct mushrooms E-estonia is a national project (non partisan), driven by need to develop their economy and to bui...