SDI Days 2012 > Abstract_View
Knowledge transfer for NGOs within SDI

Simon Vrečar, Luka Jovičić, AGISEE Board Member


Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are very important since they provide an organisation for local communication. In fact they are offering a mechanism or platform for working on the fields where governmental sector has failed and business sector haven’t found commercial interest. Being the non-profit organisations the NGOs can implement projects without having the support of governmental budget since there are opportunities to collect the private donations. However the public sector can play the role of a donor too. But the fact of the status of NGOs results in the cheaper implementation of various projects. Another advantage of NGOs is that they can easier to communicate at all levels which means that they can interact whit the citizens or local people and spread their messages to the different levels of governmental administration up to the top levels of government. On the other hand NGOs are able to motivate staff and experts much easier in with less restriction that government does. The usage of spatial data in an organisation is strongly related with the introduction of geographical information system (GIS). In many cases GIS fails because the professionals and managers responsible for resources are not completely aware of the basic component of which GIS depends. It mainly contains or rather integrates following key components: hardware; software; data; procedures; people. Many surveys have been made to find out how different organisations introduced their GIS and what factors made the most impact on the decisions. On the top of the list was almost always cost, and then functionality followed by compatibility of existing hardware and software, technical support etc. In most of the cases the key for success was so called user-centred approach to GIS implementation which involves users in any decision making concerning GIS. As a part of the Non-Governmental Organizations for Spatial Data Infrastructure Project this topic is focused on identification and presentation of the key points for introducing GIS in the NGO.

Keywords: non-governmental organizations, role in public sector, mechanism of work, use of GIS, user-centred approach

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