Institutionalising a GIS Culture through Inclusive Social Media Communication

This lightning talk will share experiences on how social media communication (mainly Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, and YouTube) has accelerated the institutionalisation of a spatial-thinking culture in a Kenyan rural setting. This has led to a growing appreciation of the role of GIS in enhancing multistakeholder dialogue and transforming outcomes in the science-society-policy nexus. The setting brings together a young university, the local government, and the local community inhabiting a vast mineral-rich region. Here, mining, agriculture, wildlife conservation, and other land-use interests conflict and compete for the limited space. The integrative power of geodata-driven technologies, GIS, in sharing mapped visual evidence at scale has been a crucial part of the cumulative awareness creation, science advocacy, and decision support the region has been enjoying over seven years. Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, GIS has come in handy for effective visual communication with the benefits of impacting seven critical areas of disaster governance, coined to here as 7Ts: testing, tracing, timing, trust, transparency, training, and transdisciplinary research