Georg Gartner,
ICA President
ICA as an international organization is interested to follow its mission and aims globally. Thus my participation at the GeoTunis 2012 conference in Tunis just recently brought an interesting insight into the lively and active community of cartographers and GI scientists of primarily Arab countries. A Letter of Intent signed with a Minister of the Tunisian Government stated the intention of Tunisia to join ICA as national member again.
Besides a very interesting conference programme, a two-day workshop under the flag of ICA was given on topics of contemporary web mapping. The well received workshop, given by Vice-Chair Markus Jobst of the Commission on Map Production, demonstrated once more the strong interest ICA has in offering outreach and capacity building programmes. In order to synchronize efforts in this respect better, ICA has founded a Working Group, which is entitled to help to coordinate the variety of workshops being offered by commissions of the ICA, including the Commission on Education and Training, the Commission on Maps and the Internet, and the Commission on Open Source Geospatial Technologies.
While some activities of ICA Commissions are meant as offers for outreach and capacity building some workshops and seminars are meant for commission members and other interested experts to meet and to develop their topics of interest further. Such meetings are taking place literally globally and throughout the whole year. Check out the ICA Calendar, the ICA Commission web pages or the National and Affiliate Member sites to get information on this. Let me mention as example the ICA Commission on Generalization which calls for papers for their workshop in Istanbul in September 2012 or the German Cartographic Society Workshop on Map Creation from User Generated Data, which has the call for paper open now.
