Another project aims to gvSIG

Today I had a meeting with a great importance foundation in Central America, and a great satisfaction has filled me by knowing that they have pointed to the bid of promoting gvSIG for municipal use.

I mean to a Municipal Development-oriented Foundation, an institution that has existed since 1993 and has been developing projects at the Central American region. I heard about it a few years ago, when they were working with USAID funds driving to modernize municipal processes among which are included the financial area, cadastre and some land ordinance… but do much more than that.

The foundation developed in the nineties a tool known as Integrated Municipal Information System (SIIM) that included modules for use with priority by Budget, Treasury, Tax Control, Accounting and Registration departments; but also included others. In those years, solution was done by a monolayer construction on Visual Fox and rudimentary links to ArcView 3x via raw shape files.

Now I’ve seen the version they have migrated, doing, according to its executive director “A complete redesign” in what is called the Management Information System and Advanced Municipal management SIGMA. The system presents a multi-layered infrastructure; the user layer is completely on web, built on .NET C# and a MySQL database that serves the data via ASP from a server running Windows Server 2003. I saw the functionality and seem quite interesting; we’ll talk about it later.

To date the system has at least 13 modules, oriented to the management of most municipal activity on finances and the cadastre of tax application. These are the modules:

SIGMA is a redesigned version of what it was the previous SIIM with more conceptual clarity. In this year we will agree in seven municipalities where one of my attempts will be to connect Manifold to this platform, but I also believe I will seek to implement the mapping of a municipality that is starting from scratch on gvSIG, knowing that these people may benefit from the experience to continue in other territories.

Until now the system is functional at tabular level, but when making them the query about how have they walked with the geometric management, they have left me a good satisfaction:

Working with gvSIG.

For now, one of the foundation boys is taking a master’s degree at the University of Girona; I hope to partner them with the other institution I’ve previously mentioned in order to promote the dissemination of this tool for municipal use, and ultimately who knows if with them we’ll promote Free GIS conferences in the Central American region. I’m not sure if they dare to join the III SIG free conferences that are coming; I still have an upcoming meeting with them.

As these institutions are involved in using free or low cost applications, we will have best practices and greater sustainability of the projects. For what I know of this foundation, which incidentally is non-profit, we will have much to talk about in the next 10 years as its experience for over 15 years in streamlining processes and products modernization is wide; so we will see if they walk on the topic.