MapAid Formal Steering Meeting & Informal Team Building Weekend

In November, several MapAid volunteers met together in a relaxed setting to discuss our work in Africa.

Intrepid volunteers came from across the four Kingdoms to a location in central England, bringing expertise in geographic mapping, IT, small business growth, and project management. The meeting was engineered jointly by Keith Heron and Rupert Douglas-Bate. Keith is a volunteer who currently carries out a mentoring role for our business development, while his day job is at Henley Business School, as an associate professor of entrepreneurial studies.

We happily discussed our work, mentioning our esteemed university partners, who could not attend but are key in the realm of AI mapping of groundwater. We noted the fact that before AI came along we would have processed all our data and produced our maps manually, so why should we stop doing that alongside the manual processes of feeding data into maps ? The beauty is we can do both! (If we use AI, well, we can sit back and sip a glass of water, a glass or beer, or cup of tea. Slightly easier we would say…)

We met for an evening meal and enjoyed one another’s company.

Elements of intellectual, practical, and team building were created, and the weekend was deemed a success by all.

A team of honourable servants, one might say, came together, committed to talking about how to serve the most important person who could not attend.

This person is the small subsistence farmer, of whom 500 million exist on the planet, with their families totalling 2.5 billion people - impacting their drinking water, irrigation and food supply is our goal – and why we exist.