Institute for Conscious Global Change

GISCorps volunteer assists a US based nonprofit organization

In 2013, the Institute for Conscious Global Change or ICGC, a US based nonprofit organization requested the assistance of an experienced GIS professional. The volunteer was asked to provide a variety of GIS services form data collection, to web application design and research. The recruitment resulted in deploying Kenny Lohr, a GIS professional from Florida.

Over the past few months, Kenny has led a small group of GIS volunteers and interns to help configure and structure ICGC’s enterprise geodatabase on Amazon’s ec2 server. ICGC is now able to serve out client GIS data and host the Millennium Earth Project’s interactive map catalog. The map catalog allows users to access a variety of spatial development data in the form of curated web maps and web scenes. The map catalog is broken into categories and can be viewed with many common 2D basemaps as well as on the 3D Google Earth.

Additionally the team has streamlined remote workflows to allow volunteers and interns to assist with the project regardless of their physical location. This allows to deliver better results to clients while providing a positive experience for those on the technical team.

While gathering and creating development data to assist with UN development goals, ICGC has also begun providing enterprise GIS services to external organizations, allowing those without the GIS infrastructure or staff to use web maps to visualize their project data. Currently ICGC has been working with EcoCity Builders to set up the GIS infrastructure they need to run web maps for their “Ecocitizen World Map Project.” ICGC staff traveled with EcoCity Builders on location to two of their pilot cities, Casablanca and Cairo, to provide support with crowd sourced data collection and assist with building web maps which were used to promote their project during the World Urban Forum in Medellin, Colombia this past month.

Application developers are now busy building the user interface for the Millennium Earth application. This project is ongoing, check this web page for future updates.