DAI’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Team last week gave a demonstration of a new application that promises to revolutionize the economics and hence the possibilities of GIS-enabled knowledge management in the international development field.

In a presentation to representatives from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, the Department of State’s Humanitarian Information Unit, and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, GIS Team Leader Bob Bouvier and Senior Development Specialist Andrew Ross introduced a technology application that enables users to link, view, and then manipulate their data through universally available geospatial platforms.

“The important thing about this application is that it defangs the GIS technology by giving it a familiar and friendly face,” said Bouvier. “In the past, this kind of functionality would conjure up visions of complex technology, high price tags, and Ph.D.s doing the work. We’ve effectively neutralized that discussion: what we should be talking about is the data, not the technology, and that’s the essence of what we have here.”

Bouvier described a system that will readily allow development projects, development practitioners, and other stakeholders to display project data on a geospatial platform, then sort, share, and contextualize that data with facility. “The open source web-service and database that reside behind the display enables us to equip governments with significant information management capability very cost-effectively, without thinking about licensing,” he said. “Anyone can do it, and when you see it out there, all of a sudden you see your project in a whole new context.”

The subject matter of last week’s presentation was public-private partnerships, specifically those developed by USAID’s Office of Global Development Alliances (GDA). The GIS team helped Kristi Ragan—who leads DAI’s GDA support services project—show how the Alliances in a given country can be graphically displayed, categorized, overlaid with pertinent contextual factors, and so on.

Ragan presented the system as a decision support tool that will help Missions define their public-private partnership strategy. But the nature and use of the data is entirely up to the user. Next week, for example, Bouvier flies to Indonesia, where the near-real-time capabilities of the system may enable faster and better targeted outbreak response by DAI’s avian influenza control project. On February 25, Bouvier and Andrew Watson will demonstrate the system at a knowledge management fair organized by USAID’s Bureau of Economic Growth, Agriculture, and Trade, in this case focusing on the system’s utility in the resource management arena (miombo forests).

For more information on this or other activities of the DAI GIS team, please contact Bob Bouvier or Andrew Ross.