In the end of last week, I had an opportunity to travel up north to trail GISTDA roadshow activity which brought GISTDA’s key customers and the press to keep track of Geo-information Database development project participated by the Dornsila community, Amphoe Viengchai in Chiang Rai province. The customers and the press were highly interested in the project. The most impressive thing was the community leader who highly placed importance and interested in Geo-information. Therefore, I couldn’t help bringing messages from all the beautiful adolescences who are the Dornsila community leader to GISTDA folks to acknowledge their feelings.

          Starting with Khun Virat Promsorn, the community leader from Baan Smarnmit 1 in Dornsila said that “The weakness of the community that hasn’t known Geo-information was that the people in the community wouldn’t know where we were standing, on whose land and we couldn’t figure it out how to go one. We were completely lost. But then after there were maps and Geo-information as tools which made people in the community knew where we were standing and whose land we were standing on. Was the land ours or not. We knew the size, the forest area, and water source that we could beneficially use for consumption, which effects the whole community to start planning process and managing resource in the area at the same time.”

          He also added “Resource management of our people in the community was considered as conflict management in the area which has high rate in seizing resource in high area, especially in all northern area that seems to have the same problem. But when we started to know and continuously use the advantage of maps and Geo-information, we learned that all the maps, which we had made and used in the past, haven’t had details or clear as it should have been. Therefore, the community has lost its advantage that it should have gotten. And when there were problems, we didn’t know any contact person or responsible sector to provide help for us.”

          For Khun Vilai Napaiwan or Taew, the Vice President of Community Organization of Dornsila said that “In the past, the community couldn’t access to the data from government sector or the used data was under standard so our data wasn’t good enough. Therefore, if the community could develop and standardize the data system by using Geo-information to integrate together, we would be able to use data to develop the community to meet the same standard. It would provide better communication and understanding including helping people in the community to manage their personal data form facts. The data would be processed and participated by a variety of functions, for example, Community Organization and representatives from the troubled villagers, local data which was the original data, household data including building understanding to the community as well.”