The last couple of days the pictuesque city of Chambery became a gathering place for humanitarian actors, researchers and organizations. CartONG organized their biannual GeOnG conference in their headquarter city. This years conference was at the same time the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the NGO. CartONG is a French non-governmental organization that fosters the use of geographic information tools to improve data gathering and analysis. Hereby they work in close collaboration with humanitarian aid and emergency relief organizations as well as development programmes.
Attendants of the GeOnG had the chance to learn about current practices and projects, the latest technologies and developments in workshops, round tables, panels, lightning talks and speed geeking sessions faciliated by CartONG and provided by international organizations, actors and researchers including Médicins sans frontières, UN OCHA, UNHCR, British Red Cross and the International Federation of the Red Cross, the Digital Humanitarian Network and MapAction.
Benjamin Herfort, Melanie Eckle and Marcel Reinmuth attended the conference to present current research and projects of the GIScience research group and to share their knowledge regarding OSM methods.
They organized a half day workshop in which attendants with different levels of OSM experience could learn about and test different methods of OSM data import and export.
Benjamin Herfort and Melanie Eckle were moreover invited as panelists to round tables on the use of Big data and the use for the humanitarian field and Crowdsourcing for humanitarian programming.
We thank the CartONG team for facilitating this interesting gathering and are looking forward to taking our collaboration further.