“Are we speaking the same language? A celebration of diversity” was the theme of the GISSA Gauteng annual general meeting held on 5 March 2008 at the South African Museum of Military History in Johannesburg. Chairman Stuart Martin welcomed the members present and provided the good news that there had been a major increase in paid-up membership for the Gauteng branch. He advised that the branch’s major goal for the year was to improve GISSA Gauteng’s education initiatives through participation in Science Unlimited 2008 and the GIS Week program.
Four new committee members were elected during the course of the meeting. They are:
- Eric Nthambeleni who will be working on transformation issues and government liaison.
- Dirk Craigie who will be working on the branch newsletter and the Standards Generating Body.
- Jaco Louw who will be working on the member database.
- Maryke Mostert who will be the student representative on the committee.
The rest of the meeting was devoted to a series of presentations. Rudolf de Munnik from GIMS gave a talk on making sense of the various GIS languages and Francois Venter from the Gauteng Department of Health gave a presentation on GIS in health information management highlighting their success with the Environmental Health Pilot. Rudi Posthumus gave an interesting talk on how Standard Bank is making use of GIS entitled “GIS as a tool for business intelligence” and Laurette Coetzee from Open Spatial Solutions spoke on the topic of integrated management systems for municipal health services.
After lunch Serena Coetzee and Anthony Cooper presided over the SA Address Standard workshop which was held in parallel to the remainder of the day’s presentations. Dirk Craigie from the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (DWAF) gave members an overview of GIS and water resources at DWAF; Maryna Strydom from SRK Consulting gave some feedback from the recent data curation conference, and Hentie Viviers from Africon Engineering ended off the presentations with a talk on backlog and asset management in local government.
Contact Stuart Martin, GISSA Gauteng, Tel 012 349 0055, stuart.martin@geoterraimage.com