At its ninth session in August 2019, the Committee of Experts welcomed the development and refinement of the Implementation Guide of the United Nations Integrated Geospatial Information Framework (UN-IGIF) in preparation for subsequent and broader global consultations with Member States and other key stakeholders. The Committee also agreed that the Implementation Guide should be showcased at the Sixth High Level Forum on UN-GGIM, to be held in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in April 2020.
With the continued support of the World Bank, the Regional Committees of UN-GGIM, and other international partners, over the past year the UN-GGIM Secretariat has initiated an ongoing inclusive global engagement and consultative process through expert workshops and meetings to develop the Implementation Guide constructively with inputs from more than 110 countries. This approach has had the benefit of ensuring that, as a methodological framework, the UN-IGIF and the Implementation Guide is truly 'country owned, and country led'.
After an intense drafting process, the draft Implementation Guide was readied for its broad global consultation process.
Given the volume of information to be reviewed in the draft Implementation Guide, it was not practical to provide all of the documents via email to stakeholders. Therefore, this dedicated UN-IGIF consultation web-page was established for ease of access and reference. It could be observed that the UN-IGIF website contains an Overview as well as Part 1: Overarching Strategy. Part 2: Implementation Guide will take one directly to the documents of the Guide.
On the Part 2: Implementation Guide page, each of the 9 Strategic Pathways are provided as separate chapters with appendices. These chapters are preceded by an introductory chapter 'Solving the Puzzle', which describes how to understand and use the Implementation Guide.
Not all chapters of the draft Implementation Guide were available initially. They were progressively loaded onto the website as they were completed. For this reason, and given the volume of information required to be reviewed, the consultation was initiated for a period for 3 months, commencing 2 March 2020 and concluding 29 May 2020.
Reviews and comments on the draft Implementation Guide were requested. Each of the chapters of the Implementation Guide, which are in PDF format, can be downloaded and comments and feedback preferably directly inserted into the downloaded documents at the relevant locations using the 'comment' tool.
It was suggested that Solving the Puzzle be read first, followed by Strategic Pathway 1: Governance and Institutions. This was suggested to provide a good understanding of the format, structure and layout of the Guide, which is consistent for all 9 Strategic Pathways.
Completed comments and feedback were to be provided to Ms. Vilma Frani (frani@un.org) by 29 May 2020 (the first deadline).
As a small number of chapters of the draft Implementation Guide have not been completed and progressively loaded onto the website in a timely manner as were originally anticipated, the broad global consultation period was extended to conclude on 26 June 2020 (the second deadline).
The consultation was extended for the final 2 chapters only (Strategic Pathway's 3 and 5) to Friday, 17 July 2020. The submission of contributions for the first eight chapters of the Implementation Guide by 26 June 2020 was strongly encouraged.