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| geomatics
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NTRE ON
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hat was a
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themes of
h aimed at
geoinformation support and integral amendment of legal,
technical, methodological and management procedures in the
following fields:
egeoinformation infrastructure,
ereal estate,
ephysical planning, and
eenvironmental protection.
As a support to these four subprojects on the level of spatial
data another two subprojects were initiated in the field of:
e land cadastre and
etopography.
The entire ONIX has been supervised by a separate
management subproject. When the above mentioned
subprojects reached the implementation phase, the subproject
Training Centre begun as anticipated mediator of the results of
ONIX to professional public. In the following two years (from
the end of the year 1998 to the start of 2000), the centre became
operational with establishment of all necessary services for
organization of education programs.
The first steps of the project were related to the analysis of
potential users of data and education services in Slovenia. A
special questionnaire was designed to asses the needs for
training. The investigation encompassed the following classes
of employees:
eselected state secretaries and counsellors of the
government,
esectorial directors and inspectors at the Ministry of
Environment and Physical Planning,
etechnical staff in state administration,
esurveyors at different levels at the Surveying and
Mapping Authority,
emanagement and tehcnicial
administration (communes),
eemployees in public services,
einvestors into real estate,
eusers of GIS equipment and spatial data in private
companies.
employees in local
Latter, the database was extended significantly for the purpose
of mailing of invitations to courses and for distribution of
information to the users.
The first organized public event organized by Training Centre
was in fact the kick-off conference with over 400 participants
from upper and middle management in state and local
administration. They were attracted by strategically oriented
themes introducing the role of geomatics in general and
particularly the project ONIX and by carefully selected invited
lecturers, namely: the doyen of Slovenian geomatics and
general director of Statistical Office, Mr. Tomaz Banovec, the
former president of the International Cartographic Association,
Prof. Joel Morrison and Prof. Andrew U. Frank followed by his
colleagues from Technical University from Vienna.
Shortly after that the first organized education programs have
been prepared by the project team and by the trainers who were
in principle involved also in some ONIX subproject and in the
program board of the centre. At the beginning the programs
were layered into, so called, presentation, basic and applied
217
level (Radovan, 1999). To avoid any risk of empty classrooms
the participation fees were offered at a discount rate.
The single day presentation level program was organized on the
selected sites of the local administration with mailing,
telemarketing and personal invitations. It served as a promotion
and introduction into more technically oriented themes.
The basic level covered the themes from ONIX (including
management with geomatic "flavour"!) as seminar and was
executed jointly by domestic and foreign lecturers in two days,
followed by the "train the trainers" module in the third day. The
program was huge success. It was repeated three times.
The applied level was executed at the end of the
implementation phase of ONIX, again jointly with lecturers
from abroad. It included workshops with individual and team
work, discussions, demonstrations of software solutions and
case studies from all topics related to ONIX.
At any execution in the course of the project, the number of
participants was intentionally limited to between 15 and 40,
depending on the type of training method. As lectures tended to
be designed as practical as possible, this seemed to be optimal
number, which allowed fruitful discussion.
In the spring 2000, the project ONIX with all subprojects
formally concluded. In the framework of ONIX, Training
Centre for Geomatics prepared 170 hours of programs, which
were executed in more than 300 hours counting also repetitions.
Every lecturer provided textual and presentation part for
dissemination of the materials. About 50 lecturers were
involved. The share of foreign lecture materials (distributed in
English) was 40 %. The Training Centre established all
necessary professional service for attracting and managing the
users: program board, financial service, marketing, promotion,
distribution of printed invitations and certificates, presentation
equipment and administraton of users database.
3. SELF SUSTAINING TRAINING CENTRE
The project Training Centre was the first attempt to offer
systematic approach in geomatics education in Slovenia. It
provided the knowledge, practice and infrastructure for further
development of service for growing interest in specialised
education on job.
After the conclusion of the project which ment also the cease of
permanent financial inflow from the ministry and the World
Bank, the Training Centre had to act as financially self
sustaining body. It had to be transformed from a project team to
a business part of Geodetic Institute of Slovenia. Thus, since
then the name of the centre has only been used as a trade mark
covering geomatics education and not as a name for some
physically and legally established institution (Radovan et al.,
2000a).
Fortunately, in the time of this transition, the centre still had
plenty of prepared materials in stock which have not been
executed yet in the course of the project. In that time it also
become clear that the centre would survive on the market only
if we:
ebroaden the scope of education themes from the topics of
ONIX to other professions as well,
