 So welcome everybody to today's webinar called Open Source Software and Open Data for Integrated Water Resources Management. My name is Leneke Knope and I'm from the Water Channel and this is the first webinar in a series of IHG Delft alumni online seminars organized in cooperation with the Water Channel. So very warm welcome to all IHG Delft alumni and as the webinar is open to all we also very much welcome our partners, professionals and everybody who is already inside. Before introducing and handing over to the speaker which is Hans von der Kost today I would like to mention that we are in an interactive webinar room. So on your right bottom corner you see a chat box and this chat box can be used for two things. So I would like to invite you to mention your name, your expertise and your organization so that we have an idea of who is in this room and secondly you can post your questions in this chat box throughout the whole webinar. So we will collect the questions during the webinar and then we post them to the presenter after his presentation then the questions will be addressed at that point. So today we are very happy to have Hans von der Kost and Hans is going to tell us a bit more about open data, the use of it and the importance of open data for organizations working in the water sector. Hans finished his PhD at Utrecht University already quite some time ago in which remote sensing was central to his research and after that he went to the Flemish Institute for Technological Research. He carried out more research on spatial, dynamical, environmental modeling and currently Hans is a senior lecturer at IHE Delft in Eco-Hydrological Modeling. Hans will also ask you a few questions during his presentation in which you are encouraged to participate. These will be poll questions. So that's it for my side. Let's start and enjoy the webinar. Hans, I'm handing over to you. Thank you. So I would like to thank the water channel and IHE Delft and alumni officer to give me this opportunity to present about my work on open source software, open data for integrated water resources management. So let's get started. First of all, yeah, we see this road here and as being in the Netherlands in the Institute we have students that use a lot of bicycles and especially old bicycle and we know that with an old bicycle we can reach the valley which we see on the picture but we are not sure with the breaks that are failing and the tires that are not good if we could face the challenges on the horizon, the mountains that we see. But we can be clever than just always using our old bicycle. We can also look around in the community and see if there are people with good parts that we can use to maybe combine it with our own knowledge on how a bicycle should work to create a super bicycle. Of course this metaphor is not related to bicycles and roads but it's related to the way we work. So the challenges on the horizon are in fact the main drivers that challenge our work in the water sector. It's climate change and population growth mainly and the different sectors have to deal with it and the problem is often that these sectors are not well connected. They don't share data and information in the best way and that is needed if we want to do integrated water resources management. So this presentation will be about how we can use open data and open source software and even open courseware to share better the knowledge that we have to deal with these drivers that affect the water sector. The first question is what does open exactly mean? Well by definition a piece of software or data or information or even a course can be called open if anyone is free to use it but also reuse it and redistribute it and you can only put two restrictions to it. You can give the requirement to attribute to the person who originally created the code or the software or the data or to share it alike. Share alike is a type of license where if you give that license to your product it means that everybody has to put the same license on it so people can use it and reuse it do whatever they want but they also have to give it open away to others to also reuse it again. And then it also we often deal with publicly funded data that is funded through our projects or funded by governments and we need to think about how we offer that data back to the society who in fact paid for it. So publicly funded data are public good and they are produced in the interest of the public and should be freely available to a maximum extent possible. Of course we can argue about how this would work and I hope this presentation will help you to understand that there are different ways to deal with sharing the data. So the first question I have for the audience is you will see a list of data types files and which ones if you download it from a portal cannot be considered as open data. So please use the interactive option on your screen to choose an answer. So is a shape file, PDF, an Excel sheet or GeoTiff which one can we not consider as open data. We see the answers coming in it's really nice to see it interactively and we see that most people give the right answer it's a PDF file. A PDF file is of course very nice and we can have maps in PDF format but the problem is we cannot reuse it so it does not apply to the definition. Well data in Excel sheet although Excel is not open source software but the data in it is in fact open if you can download it you just need to buy the software or have other software to open it. A shape file is open well not really an open format but can be read by all open source software and same for GeoTiff. So PDF is not the right way to share scientific data. It is a great way to share open access papers because then we don't need the data but the text and we can read it. Thank you for your participation this works great. So but what are the benefits then of open access it's all about not reinventing the wheel. So for organizations it is to more efficiently collected data and process it and reduce the duplicate efforts and for scientists they need a lot of data to feed their models and tools so if their data is more openly available we can link more data to our models and tools and give a better service to public administrations but also citizens and businesses. If we have more open data we can also have entrepreneurs and scientists working together to make new innovative products and apps. In this era of mobile apps there's a lot of opportunity for innovation through open data. There are lots of examples a few I will show. In the end it's also about the greater democratic accountability. If we make more transparent what data is collected with tax money and be more open about it even if the quality is sometimes not good enough then we can look for collaboration and projects to even increase the quality and to do better things with the data. And in the end we all want a better management of the environment so ultimately this would lead to better dealing with environmental issues and the drivers that I showed in the first slides. Why should water sector organizations and universities use open source open access? Well currently there's a lot of inequality and access to data and knowledge. As here at IHE a lot of lecturers work in capacity development projects abroad we face often challenges that students abroad cannot easily access the same journal papers that we read. The cost of education is often very high for software a lot of correct versions are used so that also introduces problems and especially the access to data from your own country is very difficult because the governments don't all are eager to open up the basic data that is needed to good integrated water resources management and develop the right tools for it. For the more it is the transparency on impact of your work so by opening up other people can see better what you do and if you are a public organization and a university then the best way to do it is through opening up your results to a wider audience. How does IHE DELF deal with open data or with the concept of open? Well our MSC thesis and PhD thesis are online accessible open access and with publications from me and my colleagues we try more and more to to have them also in open access journals where possible and we hope that funding organizations also promote that because it often comes at a cost but the cost of open access publications is for the authors and the organization of the author and not for the reader so it moves in fact the responsibility for paying to the authors and the organization while many more people can download the articles and do interesting things with it and learn more about environmental management. OpenCourseWare is another way that we deal with it. We have a website ocw.unihg.org where you can find all our OpenCourseWare courses. I have a few on open source GIS using QGIS and on data management for the water sector. The other thing that we work on is SDI spatial data infrastructures. I will talk more about that in this presentation and we have a DOPC 200 project to set up more and more of these spatial data infrastructures and also from different capacity development projects we set up more SDIs. Another thing you might have heard of is IATI. Some of our programs are implementing IATI. It's not yet for all projects that we have in the Institute but IATI is a way of in a standard way reporting your impact through the projects that you have in especially in AID projects. What we all like to do more and more is to promote the use of free and open source software which is called FOSS. It's also very important to acknowledge that our MSC and PhD participants but also people who join us in projects are the agents of change. If we give a good example here we hope that also this is taken up in the countries where we work and to have more like a global change on dealing with open data. Sometimes we encounter things that we think that are open but are not so PDF is an example but often when we publish papers we can read that the code is available upon a request from the authors and it was a nice discussion a few weeks ago on Twitter where a person responds to this phrase like okay but not everybody can make clear code and is it not the results that count for science and then the person who posted this also responded to it and I agree with her that well if you cannot replicate those results then the results in fact are maybe not so valuable and can be considered just as an anecdote so we need to do better our best to be transparent also if you write code to put it in open source languages and to make sure that other people can run it and verify your results. That's the only way that we can prevent all kinds of fake news hoaxes that we have to deal with nowadays so put your code on github and share it. That brings me to three examples that I want to show most attention will go to sharing of open data and then I'll touch in the end the open courseware and the business models behind it and free and open source software how it can be used. So spatial data infrastructures are called SDIs and in the 90s it was very popular to set up databases and repositories and clearing houses and people that I speak nowadays who were doing those kind of projects in the past they say ah that all didn't work and don't try it again but we live in a completely different era this is the era where everybody has or many people have a smartphone internet connection is very high the use of internet is more interactive like things that we do now in this online seminar so more and more people are used to working with interactive tools to the web and an SDI is therefore not just a simple database that we put somewhere but it is a whole infrastructure and it is used to discover the data we need to enable people to find the data so it's more like an interactive search engine with a catalog behind it people before they want to use the data they want to visualize it and play around with it before they decide to download it and people want to evaluate the quality which is put in a meta data I will explain what meta data is also in a bit and we also want that people have access to the data it can be access for free it can be access paid we can decide on that based on our business model and policies but we can access it also through different means like in the 90s we were quite limited but now it can be through web-based portals to apps and services on the mobile phone in the classroom so there are multiple ways to access the data now most of you might be familiar with GIS a GIS is a system about an information system containing of hardware and software that we used to deal with spatial data but eventually many people use this on their own desktop computer even in your own organization your department and when other people want your data these days they come with a USB stick and you get a copy the risk is that we get proliferation of versions and we don't know anymore who is the authority of the data and SDI changes this because we link many GIS's together that can be at a department level it can be in an organization can be in a water sector it can be in a country or it can be internationally the skill doesn't matter but it's a better way of managing your data I'm not strictly speaking only about open data but about better management and transfer of data between people who need to cooperate on the same data set so from the one of the first slides you saw that these sectors are often very much not cooperating with each other and through an SDI we can link them to to a central system and infrastructure where they can share the data with their own colleagues in their own sector or with other sectors so if we have health problems related to factor-borne diseases which are also related to water then they can get in touch to get the right data from the other departments that have data on on water for example if this data is shared more openly then entrepreneurs and researchers can use the data to develop added value products these can be mobile phone apps and models or decision support systems many governments don't have the money to have in-house development of models and tools and apps and decision support systems so by opening up their data it's the IT sector and the researchers that can take up this function and then in the end it is cheaper for the society because then the government can buy it back or have an agreement with the providers of these services and tools and it gets a wider use and paid added value services that are good for the whole economy it creates employment when we have a spatial data infrastructure we can also decide to to work in a broader way together so traditionally every project has its own website and tries to disseminate information but we can also put one up for a region or a river basin and share it among different actors in the region so here's an example from the MAMASA Sustainable Water Initiative in Kenya where we have such an infrastructure and that many actors can link to it also with their own GIS system that they have and they share not only data also metadata you can use it for sharing the documents for example your open access papers but also it's a social network where you can find out who does what in the region and get in touch with them and discuss the data sets so I don't say you have to work in a completely different way it is about working smarter and not harder and we can consider an SDI not just as a database as I said but as an infrastructure which is comparable with a road I can give you a very silly example if you want to go from your home to your work you use a road it's not you who constructed the road from your house to your work and if everybody does it becomes a mess it is a common investment from the tax money that we all pay that the government constructs roads or some companies constructed based on a group of people who want a road and then there are some rules to drive on the road for an SDI it is the same so the road does not determine that you have to drive on it with only a car you can use it in different ways the same for a spatial data infrastructure you can use it to in an efficient way move data from one place to the other and the rules are the open standards the standards that make it possible that we can share data through different means of use different applications or services and it's all about reuse to share data skills knowledge and the investments to do that and it's about learning from each other now for a second interactive question for you have you ever used open data from a web portal from your own country the question will come soon on the screen there it is and try to answer good to see already that many people have used open data from a web portal there's a few people who don't know if the data that they don't download it was indeed open that can happen of course so that also needs to be clear from the portal side great to have these answers thank you so it all sounds fantastic and great to do but we are not all doing it although i see that many people use open data but it's still not enough and like a road we also face some speed bumps that slow down this process so why don't we share it is because many gis users tend to develop their own data sets on their computers which become silos and they use their own software systems their own data structures their own file types and that makes it really difficult to to share the data with others they also don't know often that other people work in the same topic and need the same data so there's not much collaboration and we also know that nowadays the data collection cost the human resources are much higher than the cost of gis hardware and software so especially with open source software we can do a better job to reduce those costs and increase the fieldwork and the capacity to get data from the field so there are there's a lot of duplicate efforts going on now there are three reasons posted by the sdi handbook for africa from unica and the funny thing is these arguments are used by the same people so first of all there's a a priori suspicion to use data from others it can't be good it's from others especially if it's free if it's free it can't be good that's what people even say to me uh why is your software that you're using classes free is it is there something wrong with it so that's a bit the spirit that is there on the other hand these people they uh presume that their own institutions data is is of high quality but if they give it away other people will use it wrongly so they're scared of sharing it but the same people also fear that if they share it that people will find that the data is very poor and that it causes all kinds of problems that they use lose their face well in the next slide i will explain solutions for these kind of fears that people have about opening up their data but first um yeah one way to prevent it the classical way is to sell your data and then hope that people pay a lot and not many people will use it but what is uh in fact the value of data well it has not a very high value at the moment you collect it from the field especially if it's government or project data it's already paid for and uh when we add uh a validation to the data and we aggregate the data and we package it into products and services and models then we add value to the data and then you can ask more and more money and there are people willing to pay for the added value services i will give some nice examples later about that so in the ideal situation a public body uses the public money to collect the data provides it as open data and then the public and or private sector can add value and then users will be paying for for this and make interesting services and products to to add value even more value to the data in order to do so of course you cannot just open up your data that's not the easy process not at the country level but also not at an institutional level so you need to have a data policy and also link the data policy to a business model so there's some great data policies in countries also in Africa where here we have an example from Rwanda the national data revolution policy a great title and I really hope that that we succeed in that and in Europe for some years we have the inspired directive which is a law that says that all European countries need to share their data the government data and there are protocols for that so we need commitment from all the stakeholders it doesn't necessarily have to be open but you need to choose a proper license and you need a policy that is linked to a business model people also often forget that there's a cost for selling the data because if you want to sell data you need the administration to keep track of to who you sell it you need to do sales and marketing which has a cost you need to develop restriction you need to sue people who misuse the data so a lot of administrative costs that we forget and then the benefits are are quite large there are benefits for governments in the past also in the Netherlands one administration had to buy the data from another administration nowadays because the inspired directive these transactional costs are not existing anymore so we gain a lot of money or we save a lot of money on the transactional costs but also jobs are moving more and more towards using and adding value to this data so lots of jobs are created and as you know for many years we can freely download satellite images from NASA and I don't have the idea that United States get poor of it and we know that it gives a lot of benefits on development of nice tools and many of you use it and we use it also here in the classroom and for companies similar things they also have less transactional costs and more opportunities to create tools and services and they can also make money with that so it's good for the economy in the end to open up the data now people also with digital data don't always want to pay for the data I could have a poll question who of you listens to music that is not paid for or watches movies but that's a bit tricky because you might get sued but I know most of you are just downloading this from the internet but so there's a low willingness to pay and then creative people started Spotify and Netflix so you pay a little bit and you get access to a lot of things and by many people paying a little bit you have more access the other thing is that there is competition from what is already open so you can release your data at a cost but maybe it exists already openly a great example of that is open street map so the third question I want to ask the audience is have you ever used open street map data we have a lot of my students participating today there's a short course on open source GIS going on this week and they all played with with open street map so they know it so it gives maybe a little bit of bias but when I first asked the class if they know open street map then the response was very low so we see indeed that many people know it but also many people don't know it or didn't use it thank you for your answers now we can compare open street map with google maps for example now open street map is a community driven collection of of topographical data topographical maps made by the community well google has another business model and with google you get a nice service that many of us use to navigate but these are pictures and we pay with our privacy so if we look for a shoe shop for example then the next day in our gmail we get a lot of advertisements about shoe shops with open street map you don't get advertisements and it's communities working on on the mapping and this data is not just a picture we can download it into our GIS and use it further we do map atons and one of I will talk more about what it is later but in one of the map atons we mapped the Mara river basin in Kenya and here on the left on the picture you see older Kessie community in the Outback where Maasai live in their manyatas and if we compare with this comparison website the same area on google we say you see a gray square with no data and some copyright message so you can have some copyrighted data of a gray square on the left side the copyright is at all the users and it has a lot of data that we can use for further analysis or for humanitarian aid so we can do in fact the same but more data for many places available in open street map so you always need to compare now open street map have has some nice tools a very nice tool that it starts with if we want to do a map aton like the one we have tonight at IHE uh is many areas are empty there's forests or swamps where people don't live and during map atons we are going to map houses buildings and with map swipe a lot of users can use their smartphone from the public transport or while they're waiting for an airplane to help preparing a map aton so with map swipe you can look it up it's a free app it's also open source so the other apps are built on top of it University of Heidelberg is doing a lot on this we are asked users to to select a tile which has a house and all these this data is then collected and passed through to the humanitarian open street map task manager where we only give out tasks for mapping where there are settlements so it creates a settlement layer and when we do a map aton our participants get a tile and they will work on that tile to digitize it so here we see a tile that has been mapped quite extensively and even the change of our name is is there you see here a piece of delft that our alumni will recognize it's our building it's also highlighted here and everybody can edit and contribute to this map and I edited all the information on IHE delft and put our website and contact information also there so companies can also use this platform to distribute their information because more and more people use this open street map also in apps to navigate and do other nice things so tonight we have a mapping party it's I think already the fourth one that we organized here at IHE delft normally related to to the actual things happening in the world so this time we will map Bangladesh and Malawi a lot related to flooding so we provide drinks and pizzas and our participants enthusiastically map and often it is so popular that at the closing time of the building it's very hard to to get people again out of the building so I hope it will be fun again tonight and I hope when you are near that you can join or other or another time and we do this in cooperation with Red Cross who can use the data but we can also use the data as water people we need a lot of data to come up with solutions this is an example that in QGS an open source GIS that we are teaching at IHE delft that you can simply import the data from the net of the same area and get all the points lines and polygons this is not possible with with google maps it has an attribute table and we can do all kinds of analysis with this now you're not alone when you map in a mapathon there are lots of communities worldwide and here you see a map of all the open street map communities in Africa so if you're interested in this type of work and you want to do voluntary things on OpenStreetMap in your free time then yeah look for the community in your neighborhood and join the difference between orange and gray on this picture is just how you can access them so some are more accessible through social networks and others more by email or don't have a website so check them out now let's get back to the problems with sharing I always present this iceberg because the problem is not technical every hydroinformatics student here at IHE can implement the spatial data infrastructure that doesn't mean that it's used it's all about culture it's about people process and culture it's about changing behavior it's about people accepting it it's about dealing with resistance so that's what we try to do in our projects to deal with this iceberg and I don't only want to talk about problems so I pose a few solutions to the problem so solution one is that much data is not digitally available I could have put here a real picture from my work but I don't want to embarrass people but this is still what I encounter at departments that I visit and yeah the thing is that we need to digitize this data especially if we want to take care with disasters in an urgent manner then yeah we cannot simply look for the paper where the data is so but digitizing is not enough this is also not good to put it on a hard disk or a cd or a usb disk and put it in a cupboard because then we have a data nakumat nakumat is a supermarket in Kenya and like all supermarkets they want you to walk around and buy as much as possible so there's not much organization in the goods and services that you get there online shopping might be a easier way so the solution is that you organize it in sdi and you categorize it like an online shop solution number two is standardization you can only share and connect things when you use standards to share the data so we don't say that you have to buy new software that is confirming to this but it's about using the things that you already use but preferably open source but make sure it uses open standards to interface how a mobile phone connects to a web service with the map or how your gis package communicates with with the web with web services that's very important there's an organization that takes care of that that's the open geo spatial consortium and they maintain all the standards so i don't go into the technical details which i normally do in class but just that you know about it well interoperable standards so what well very important because that means you are looking here at the same data set very actual it is the cyclone worldwide cyclone data set where you see all the hurricanes in the world and their path and we can visualize it in different platforms because it's open data and using open standards so we can open it in qgis we can open it on our web page and feature it and we can visualize it in google earth which also supports these open standards so open standards are very useful for interoperability we can even simply view it on an app and ideally if many people use open standards we can connect so you can set up a spatial data infrastructure for your water sector organization at your institute level you can connect different institutes in a sector for example the water sector that's what we did in benin there we have the a national water infrastructure it's the system national the information so low at the end of my presentation you can find some links to the things that i presented and the water sector there is already using it to share the data and we need to to train more people in it and to create more awareness that that's more use so it can connect to a national sdi there are already continental ones for europe we have the inspire portal the national level in nedlands we have the the national portal for the nedlands and they all connect to this higher level ones so very useful solution number three is metadata very strange slide we see some beer bottles so if you are going to to a pub and if you like beers then you want to get your favorite brand of beer but when what happens if the bar keeper gives you a bottle without a label yeah well then you can taste it but maybe you're you're not sure still if it's the right beer that you want so you try another one and another one and after five beers it doesn't matter anymore if you have the one that you wanted so this is not the right way you have to try and try an error a lot and run into problems a better way is to do it with a bottle with a label so our alumni recognize my colleagues here on the terrace i was sitting of course at the place where we were taking the picture and here we are enjoying our favorite tusker beer in in kenya and we choose tusker because it has this label with the elephant it says us how much the bottle contains how many milliliters or centiliters the alcohol percentage it says us that we better not drive after drinking and should also not drink it when we are pregnant it gives us the ingredients and the expiry date based on all that information we decide to drink uh something from that bottle it's not the bottle telling us to drink well they try but the bottle can still fortunately not talk to us so the point of course is to translate this to your data meta data should clarify the terms of use of data and then it is the responsibility of the user to drink from the bottle and drive and get an accident so all these arguments of yeah users will do stupid things with our data it's nonsense if you just are clear in the meta data that the data is generated from a bachelor student or from a national water authority that makes a big difference and people can have more trust maybe in the data from the water authority there's much more metadata that you can add so like what is the projection the units how was the data created preferably link it to a paper or to a journal or sorry to a thesis so people can get more information and decide themselves if the data is useful or not so meta data is really the key now there are some challenges that we face especially in our work abroad that sometimes the internet connection is very low oh maybe the moderator can move the screen back thank you so internet bandwidth is an issue but of course it is improving through time a lot so more and more networks are being rolled out and the private sector is doing more for that so it is it is currently a serious problem but we hope in the future we can cope with it what we try is to make our websites to deal with sdi light and responsive to the platform another challenge is skills so setting up all these servers so we can help you with our projects to do that we can we also work with companies in the south to set up sdi's it companies and we we can also calculate the benefits and the costs of it and look at outsourcing we can help you with building the skills to to administer it to use it and and we can help with awareness for this so lots of opportunities what is not the right way forward is to have silos and projects so project-based sdi's look nice for the project but as we know these websites go into some hibernation after the project and nobody will use it anymore nobody is reachable so preferably like with our dupc 2 project we want to distribute the knowledge about sdi in in a region or a basin or a country and that many people connect to the system like with a road you don't want to share it only with your neighbors you also want that your visitors from a long way can use the road to reach your house so that's also part of being open not in a project silo it will close down after the project but have many people connecting and have local ownership very important and that everybody is responsible for keep it going on and in the end when you have more and more people interested also the cost is lower now the last few slides are about the other topic so the why choosing open source software so the sdi's that we built are completely based on open source software so you don't have any license costs the costs go into skills into trainings and workshops but not in the software it is because this open source software is is meant to work with other software in a in a good way so they have they're good in interoperability if you buy software from a proprietary company commercial they want to lock you into their software and you get the classic vendor lock in and this vendor lock in is very tricky because they want you to use more and more of your of their software and to sell more and more I can give many examples from the water sector fortunately in the Netherlands the towers went completely open source so all their models are open source and they also link very well to this sdi so also as the Netherlands we try to compete with with other companies and countries to make a difference to not sell our source code or our software but to work on yeah let's also the proprietary tools connect to our infrastructures and let more and more people use our tools because we are there to help you with projects and we earn our money more with projects than by selling software it's a willingness to pay how many clients do you have to to pay so we want to prevent a vendor lock in and we do that with the international standards now for you there are also great opportunities when you use open source software because it's based on a community and these communities are very nice to work with very open they help each other on the internet by posing questions and answers you don't have to call this company I'm stuck and normally when I have a GIS question and I call such company the question is too difficult and after two weeks they call me back and say do you already have the answer with open source software I never had it I always find somebody with a similar problem and and that really helps so you can participate actively in the community we can also help with development of the software packages so that's by contributing with our own projects and for companies in in all countries if it's Netherlands or or a country in Africa it doesn't matter it is an opportunity for innovation all the modules are that you need to connect it and you can do a lot of scientific innovation but also yeah create nice products for the market oh yeah there's a little link here but the presentation will be also distributed here are some myths about open source I can talk of course hours about it but you can read here some of these things but I'm also open to answer questions afterwards so we want to promote the use of open source software at IHE Delft FOSS software because license costs are often too high for our target group but we often get the argument back yeah so what we use a crack sorry it's not my in my interest that you use cracks and I know they are available but cracks are unethical to use and especially if you have an alternative that is as good as the as the expensive software and it is also that the cracked versions they come with all kind of risks and with viruses and they don't have all the functionality and where is that phone number that you can call when you have a question if you have a crack better not call it because you'll get sued and we also have the problem that campus licenses give a buyer so if we provide you some expensive software through a campus license at IHE Delft then you come back home and you can't afford it in some cases and then you will use a crack so there's also some bias that we give and where we have to work on for many software there are alternatives so if you use photoshop you might have a look at GIMP for ArcGIS use QGIS there's a open courseware for me on the internet you don't have to pay you just follow the course if you need help you you choose for a paid course or you ask for tailor made training and we get the experts together and for working with references you can work with mandalay instead of end note it's completely free and has all the functionality but the list is very long now getting back to open courseware you might find it a ridiculous idea to give all your courses for free to the to the outside world but I can tell you if you have a good business model you don't get poor of that it increases the equal access to the educational materials so if you look at my QGIS open coursework course that all the materials are there it has all the slides in youtube clips it has all the exercises results in youtube clips all the exercise data and the manuals are there but still people are coming for paid courses or we do tailor made trainings abroad so it's good marketing because people can see what we do but many people get stuck and need guidance so when we have paid courses we offer added value it's the same as for data it's all about added value with face-to-face contact we can answer dedicated questions we can offer certificates which are often important and please follow the news on friday we have some surprise on this friday on related to certificates there is extra materials that we give in the class and there is a that we can tailor it directly to the participants there's some economic theory this is the curve where we see on the y-axis the amount of participants you can also think about the amount of paying participants and here we see the price of the product so if it approaches zero we have of course our open courseware and if we go down the line we see here our online courses that are paid for it's in fact can be very similar to the open courseware so it's much not much investment but you need a bit more administration and you can provide certificates then there are short courses where people come to delft to learn more about the topic these are funded either by scholarships or or self-payers or their company pays they're very useful because we have face-to-face contact and you also get to learn the institute and other people around but you you're of course more willing to pay for that tailor made trainings that is of course very nice then we come to your organization or company and help you with tailoring the course to your needs you you request us the things and we we make the course together with you and then a very nice thing is if you want to do more than just that then you come here and spend 18 months like many of you alumni did following an msc so that's a bit the business model behind it so that was my last slide I see in the in the discussion a lot of questions posted so maybe we can have a q&a session for the the rest of the time and here on the last slide there are some examples of international sdis that are used and the ones that I mentioned from mama say from kenya and the national water information system in in benin so I hope you enjoyed it and I'll give the word back to the moderator hi Hans thank you very much for your very interesting presentation indeed we had quite some questions coming in through the chat book so I will not waste any time and immediately continue by starting with the first question the first question so I put them here on the left is from Adriano he asks is the progress towards open data and open software taking into account the challenges of low bandwidth or slow internet that researchers in many countries face could you share examples now you just said that there are no technical issues but that all has to do with the person so could you react to this question a bit more it's an interesting question and we have to deal a lot with it I don't think the solution is that we provide all the data also in those places on DVDs and USB sticks because then the data is frozen and we also do not stimulate that the local organizations and SMEs take up the problem because we facilitated too much it is a business opportunity in those countries to have the private sector taking up that people need internet it is almost like a necessary thing like food and water so what we can do is stimulate it and negotiate also with the private sector that's also what we do and make our tools light and compatible with the bandwidth that we have and in our workshops and sessions we always have a second and a third network available but that's as much as we can do but I have really good faith if we look at the curves I left it out of the presentation about how the internet connection grows in the different continents and countries then there's a very good hope for everybody that that it really increases in next years oh I can't hear you can you hear me so I have a second question this is from McDelary so she asks and it may be easy to validate and secure data from big companies but how does it apply on individual level how can we make sure that data from individual research is accurate and valid yeah that's also a question that often comes back and I hope it is like I see often not used as an excuse not to disseminate the data through portals so first of all what I said is needed you need to be very clear about the quality so other people if you give it out openly can help you to improve the quality of the data so they can find you know you worked on it maybe other people collected similar data and they can help develop projects but also the funding agencies can see it and our embassies and develop projects to do data validation and add more data to it there are also existing international platforms like with open street map where we have validators tonight there will also be validators around that will validate the data these are people who consider themselves a bit more expert in in the team and validate but essentially it is if the data is from an individual that is citizen data there we use the power of the masses and like with Wikipedia peer correction if it's about working for an organization then it's the responsibility and the policy of the organization to do the question at the quality control but also to communicate clearly about the quality yeah just more to say about it if I want to leave it like that yeah no thank you I had also put up the question of Benjamin which was very much related to this you answered that now you just mentioned the event of tonight and one of the questions from the participants was about tonight so maybe this is a good moment to explain a bit more on the map a song could you tell us a bit how it works and is everybody who is in enabled to join can you explain us something thank you for the question which corresponds with the letter that I just got under my eyes here from my colleague um indeed we have tonight the special event a map a ton we organize it quite often uh you can find the information on our website so ouchy un-itchy.org maybe somebody can post the the link and register for the event online so we know how many people we can expect so also to have enough food and drinks for you so you are free to come it's open to the outside world and there you will be one of the volunteers I have a colleague from a geo company here from Delft who always helps and makes a makes it a very nice session he moderates it and a lot of people joined the previous sessions so we help each other to map these parts of the world and the things that you learn in a map a ton are also how to apply this to your own area so hopefully after the map a ton you will also contribute to the project in in your free time the only thing you need to bring is a laptop charger for your laptop and a mouse if you are a special requirements for the laptop uh no you just need a web browser and you need to connect to the internet what is also interesting for guests from abroad who cannot come here is you can get in touch with me and I can share the tasks the task numbers from the map a ton that we are doing tonight so you can also help from abroad especially if you're from Bangladesh or Malawi it would be nice that yeah that you work probably the time zone is not so for Bangladesh a bit difficult but maybe you want to contribute then yeah get in touch with me and I will provide you the details thank you for that invitation then I have a new question so you showed us the map with the numbers and showing the economical benefits now related to that slide could you give some examples of jobs that open data creates and explain how that happens could you give us a bit more info on that yeah thank you for that question it all has to do with the value chain so opening up data which is paid by projects and the government in itself does not create much employment but to add value to this data can create employment so if you have an IT company or you are in science you can do much more with that data when more data is available a great example is an IT company from Kenya that I work with it's they will also assist tonight in the map and they gave yesterday a very nice lecture on how they use open data and sdi to do business and this company is yeah it's growing based on this principle of adding value to the data so what they do is make nice absent services for water companies not only Kenya but also in in other countries they work a lot for our projects that are funded by the european commission or the dutch ministry of foreign affairs and so you can see that by just opening up the data clever people who are educated in creating absent services can that those companies can increase and their impact can increase well that's for an SME but it's also for a university if you have more data you can have more research and you can attract more PSD students postdocs to do the job on projects and it increases the innovation power and the creativity so that's the way you make money and the Lansat project of NASA is really a big example there's a there's really good evidence that yeah USA didn't get poor of opening up that data thank you for that example thanks then one of the final questions I have and in the meantime there is nice music outside our windows if you hear that that's just our office so for me to ask like could you mention some more examples of the standards of sdis and then there was already some reaction going on in the chat box that would also like to hear from you if you can give some advice on this thank you also for the reaction that is a mark from a panda that I just mentioned so open standards in technically the ones from the open geospatial consortium ogc they are wms wcs etc that is for how different platforms communicate with each other so there are many of those standards so for example if a sensor in the field needs to communicate with the web you can make your own it tool for that but then if there are other sensors from other producers they cannot connect to the sensor network and your site if you all use the same standard so sensor enablement for the web that is one ogc standard then you can link more and more sensors to your network and your web service now mark mentions that is the dutch a data provider of open data where our service online service and it has a very nice plug-in for qgis you can now access more than seven and a half thousand open data sets including aerial photographs if you live in the Netherlands you can easily find aerial photographs of different dates find your house and but also elevation model the ahn version 350 centimeter resolution of the whole of the Netherlands well is that luxury and it's all open and free because of the inspire and also because the Netherlands wants to follow this open data movement and you can imagine if you have an elevation model of 50 centimeter resolution that a lot of nice things can be done so it's up to your creativity to come up with a service there's already a app in the Netherlands yeah but the problem is that people don't adapt easily they learn something I also at university in Utrecht I learned ArcGIS and the government here is using ArcGIS so it becomes a de facto standard and people think that it's good you pay a lot for it and it's good but if there's alternative alternative even with a user base of maybe millions like qgis which can offer the same then we have to work very hard to even overcompensate for for the paid software which everybody accepts that it's good so that is some work we have to do and also with google everybody is used to google nobody fears that their privacy is on the street we use gmail addresses but if I say set up an sdi and we put it in the cloud in the amazon cloud and everybody is in shock because you put your data in the cloud and then I ask okay you're from the ministry of water or water company and I see your email addresses it sold gmail so apparently you have no problem with it that google reach your company data so there's a lot of work to be done in explaining so therefore I'm very happy to have a presentation like this there's a lot of misconceptions and the behavior of people is very hard to change because people are just used to use what they want one final example is if you want to get a package of milk from the supermarket you can use your old bicycle or you can use your Porsche yeah and people prefer to use the Porsche to get the package of milk but it does not change the package of milk yeah so keep that in mind if we only had a Porsche thank you very much for this nice answer and all the information that you gave now I see there are still some questions coming in and some are quiet specific on certain topics I've also seen that Maria has shared your email address in the chat box so I would like to ask the participants if the some of your specific questions could be directed directly towards Hans then I would like to take the opportunity at this moment to thank you Hans very much for your presentation and the next presentation or the next webinar in this series will be done in the first week of December now the announcements will be shared on the watergennel.tv slash webinars where also the recordings are and at UNESCO IH sorry at IHG Delft also the announcements will be shared so for this thank you very much and we hope to see you soon thank you all everybody who is in the webinar room for all your questions and your active involvement during the poll questions as well thank you and we're looking forward to see you soon online