Socioeconomic impacts and value of “Open” geospatial information

A workshop on Assessing socioeconomic impact and value of “open” geospatial information was conducted at George Washington University, Eliot school of international affairs on October 28 and 29.

Highlights: The objectives of this workshop are to examine the consequences of the changing technology, data, and policy landscape, evaluate the emerging new data-driven paradigms, and advance the state -of-the-art methodologies to measure the resulting socioeconomic impacts.

This was a working meeting with strong participant engagement leading to recommendations for action. Participants included economic, social and natural scientists in a forum where dialog and strategy for future directions was the theme. Outcomes of the workshop included a plan for a sustained, multi-disciplinary community to address impacts and identification of use cases for further research and applications.  Participation included policy makers and analysts, financial analysts, economists, geospatial practitioners and other experts from government, academia and the private sector.

There was a series of keynote addresses and panels. The format for each panel was centered on a pre-circulated position paper and the panel included the paper author and two discussants.

See workshop for more information.