The GEO Symposium & ODOK 2024 took place in Hangzhou, China!
GEO Mountains was represented at the recent GEO Symposium and Open Data & Open Knowledge (ODOK) Workshop, which took place in Hangzhou, China, by Dr. James Thornton.
One Sunday 22 September, Dr. Thornton attended a dedicated “Storytelling Workshop”, hosted by the National Geographic Storytellers’ Collective. All participants followed a systematic process to draft and iteratively improve a story related to their GEO Work Programme activities, including aspects such as the core of the story and why it should be told, the intended audience, the emotions that the story hopes to evoke, the main character or characters, the key take-away messages, and any call-to-action. The day culminated in everyone delivering their two-minute long stories!
On the 23 and 24 September, the GEO Symposium was held. Numerous plenary and parallel sessions sought to inspire members of the GEO community to make every effort to translate vision to action, especially as they prepare their proposals for the post–2025 Work Programme.
The schedule remained packed for the next two days (25 and 26 September); the ODOK. The number and diversity of contributions made demonstrated the extent to which the community has embraced the notion of going "beyond data", towards much fuller knowledge, over recent years.
All presentations from both the Symposium and ODOK are now freely available to view via the event webpage, including that given by Dr. Thornton at the ODOK, which focused on some preliminary work to exploit a historical event inventory and various gridded datasets to map landslide susceptibility, and included a poster on recent activities of GEO Mountains. Materials presented are also available on the GEO Knowledge Hub.
Beyond the main programme, the cultural highlight was the Impression West Lake – a lacustrine spectacle of light, music, and dance!
Following the conference, the Law and Policy Subgroup of the Data and Knowledge Working Group launched a Survey on Open Data Licensing Practices and Policies, inviting responses from across the GEO community until 6 November 2024.
Photo by James Thornton