Last week Community Health Maps traveled to Boulder, Colorado to teach a pre-conference workshop at Rising Voices 7. The theme was Converging Voices: Building relationships and practices for intercultural science. The conference was hosted by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The workshop was well attended with about two dozen participants representing numerous AI/AN tribes and other organizations. These workshop was part of the Community Health Maps project and was funded by the National Library of Medicine (funding for the workshop was provided under a sub-award from the National Library of Medicine to ICF International).The goal of Rising Voices is to "advance science through collaborations". Participants learn how indigenous and western scientific knowledge systems can compliment one another and advance our understanding of important issues in our communities. The focus is on climate.
At three hours the workshop was slightly shorter than normal. This allowed us to focus on field data collection with Fulcrum and web mapping with Carto. With a few minutes to spare Kurt Menke shared QGIS. Since he didn't have time to really demonstrate the use of QGIS he focused on the open source aspect. As an open source project, QGIS is both GIS software and a community. As such it aligns with the ethics many communities try to foster at Rising Voices.