Saudi Arabia Gov Map

Link to Map: (Click Here)

The Government Map is the first comprehensive and interactive network map of Saudi Arabia’s government ecosystem. It compiles information from 1,000+ publicly-available legal & policy documents to allow policy professionals to easily and visually navigate 450+ government entities.

Table of Contents

1. How to Use The Map

2. Project Motivation

3. Map Architecture

4. Board Representation

5. Reverse Board Representation

6. Vision 2030 Initiatives

7. Data Collection Process

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1. How to Use The Map

• Zoom in/out just like you’d do on a google map.

• Use the filters in the bottom to look at entities by Entity Type, which Vision Realization Programs it reports to, or Board Chairman.

• Use the Search Bar on top to find an entity by name (in English)

• Click on an entity to open up the entity card, which displays the entity’s information.

• While having an entity selected, click on the Focus button on the right to only see entities connected to it in the first degree. Click on the up/down arrows around the Focus button to switch to second or third degrees.

2. Project Motivation

A. Even insiders struggle to answer:

• What entities make up the government ecosystem?

• Where does each entity fit?

• How does each entity contribute to Vision 2030?

B. Vision 2030 demands continuous coordination across a complex web of institutions. As the scope of the vision increases, institutional visibility is an operational necessity.

3. Map Architecture

The project uses the nodes and edges concepts from graph theory to outline the entities and connections that make up the Saudi government ecosystem.

Entities are government organizations working to serve the public interest. They include Ministries, Authorities, Royal Commissions, and more.*

Connections are the ways in which an entity reports to another entity. A connection could be one of three types:

1. Organizational Reporting الارتباط التنظيمي

2. Chairmanship of the Board of Directors رئاسة مجلس الإدارة

3. Ownership الملكية -  for government-owned companies

Organizational Reporting was used as the highest degree of attachment in this project. It is displayed as a direct line between one entity and another, while Chairmanship and Ownership are displayed as dotted lines.

In the example below five entities are outlined based on their relationship to the Minister of Energy role:

• Ministry of Energy - reports organizationally to the Minister

• Tarshid (company) - chaired by the Minister and owned by the Public Investment Fund

• KAPSARC - both reports to and is chaired by the Minister

• Saudi Electricity Regulatory Authority - chaired by the Minister and reports organizationally to the Prime Minister

• Saudi Energy Efficiency Center - both reports to and is chaired by the Minister

4. Board Representation

Most entities except Ministries are governed by a Board of Directors. The composition of an entity’s board is written into law through the Council of Ministers, and is set either by role (e.g. a Representative from the Ministry of Energy) or individual (e.g. XYZ Person). Government entities appointed on a board are typically relevant to that entity’s function.

For example, the composition of the Board of Directors of the Saudi Tourism Authority is as follows:

Chairman of the Board

• Minister of Tourism

Members of the Board of Directors

• Ministry of Culture

• Ministry of Sport

• Ministry of Tourism

• General Entertainment Authority

• General Authority of Civil Aviation

• Public Investment Fund

5. Reverse Board Representation

We also found it useful to track the Board of Directors that each entity serves on. For example, the Saudi Tourism Authority has appointed board seats at the Real Estate General Authority and the Saudi Geological Survey، indicating correlation between the mandates of these entities.

Ministries serve on far more boards than other entities, with the Ministry of Finance topping the charts with board seats at over 60 entities.

6. Vision 2030 Programs and Initiatives

Vision 2030 is composed of 11 Vision Realization Programs (VRPs) that oversee and ensure the progress of initiatives being fulfilled under their mandate. Despite their name, VRPs are full-fledged organizations dedicated to tracking and often funding the initiatives under their mandate. Each initiative is handed to a government entity to execute and tracked by the VRP through it’s lifecycle. There were over 600 initiatives in the 2021-2025 cycle.**

For example:

• VRP: Quality of Life Program

• Initiative: Develop the home entertainment sector

• Executer: Ministry of Communications and Information Technology

7. Data Collection Process

The project is composed of a database and a map built on top of the database.

The database was built by reviewing (entirely manually) over 1,000 legal documents from the National Center for Archives & Records (NCAR) and the Bureau of Experts at the Council of Ministers (BOE). This included opening each document, reading and confirming the relevant information, and manually logging it into the database.

The Vision 2030 data was collected through the Vision Realization Program execution documents for the 2021-2025 cycle published by the Vision 2030 website. It included the collection, classification, and attribution to each executing entity of roughly 600 initiatives.

The Public Investment Fund data was collected via the PIF Company Directory. Board Member information of PIF companies was collected through NCAR, BOE, Umm Al Qura Newspaper, the Saudi Press Agency, or each company’s website.

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Notes

(*) Certain government roles such as Minister (وزير), Prime Minister (رئيس مجلس الوزراء), or Governor (أمير منطقة) have entities organizationally reporting (ارتباط تنظيمي) to them, and are considered as stand-alone entities in this project.

(**) According to the publicly available 2021-2025 VRP execution plans documents.

COVID19KSA.com | A Coronavirus tracker for Saudi Arabia

Covid19ksa.com was created to act as a single multi-lingual resource to track covid19 spread in Saudi Arabia. The project started out at a time when the only available resource for covid19 case spread data in the Kingdom was the Ministry of Health’s daily press conference and underlying tweets. That is, until covid19.moh.gov.sa - the country’s official arcGIS dashboard and singular resource for case data -, became available. The dashboard works well as a quick view to see total city-by-city case progression, but had a set of important deficiencies, namely:

1. The inability to easily view Today’s Update. This includes change in deaths, recoveries, and infected cases per city.

2. The inability to change dashboard language beyond Arabic and English. This is important, since as many as 80% of those infected in the Kingdom come from outside the country.

Covid19ksa was built to counteract these deficiencies.

We felt like this website has run its course, and has provided information for the earliest period of the pandemic spread in the Kingdom. The website was discontinued on June 30th, 2020.

Big thank you to Nawaf Alnaji and Mohammed Alawami, without whom the website would not have been possible. Big thank you to Carto for providing software via the Carto COVID19 Grants.

Climbing Communities Group Directory

Link: Climbing Communities Group Directory

During a recent 6-week trip through Europe, I became frustrated with how difficult it was to find local information on climbing areas; many of the areas had a vibrant climbing community, but it was hard to access them on the ground. On the other hand, every region in the world seemed to have a community Facebook group. I built a crowdsourced directory of most of the community climbing facebook groups in the world.

Big thanks to the more than 50 contributors from climbers around the world! If you know of any more locations, please feel free to add them.

Developing Saudi Arabia's first outdoor sport climbing areas

Link: Routes on Mountainproject

Link: KSA Climbing Areas Map

Link: Climbing Guidebook

In November of 2018 as part of my work as Director of Ops for the Saudi Climbing Federation, I had the opportunity to oversee the development project for Saudi Arabia’s first outdoor sport climbing areas. This included scouting potential locations, hiring a team of developers, getting the appropriate equipment, and documenting the outcomes.

The Team

When we had the chance to hire a team, I reached out to a number of potential developers from the US, Canada, the UK, Europe. I had spoken to the lead developer over technical, environmental, and logistical considerations over a number of occasions. We needed a team of 4, and they invited Alexandru (Alex) Ruscior, and Italian mountain guides Carlo Giuliberti (the team’s rope gun) and Piergiorgio Lotitio to the team.

The Equipment

The team had picked most of the equipment. One important part left was the type of bolts to be used. There were two options: Expansion bolts or Glue-in bolts. Expansion bolts are at least 2x faster to install, but could be unscrewed by people (anchor theft had been a problem in other areas of Saudi in the past), and might need retightening in the future. They were also unsuitable for soft rock, since they work by pushing on the inside of the hole, and would break soft rock. Glue-in bolts take longer to install, and need a full 24 hours before they can be tested (since the glue has to dry). However once installed, they can’t be uninstalled without breaking the rock.

The team’s argument was that both of the prospective areas were hard rock, and therefore using expansion bolts would allow for a greater number of routes to be developed, would be cheaper, and easier to install. My view was that whatever bolts were installed, they were going to set the pace for any future development, and would have to be built to last without maintenance or fear of loosening/corroding/tampering for years to come; I had read enough reports of areas developed with expansion bolts, only for some part of the system (bolt, hanger, or rock) to begin failing 5 - 10 years down the line. Leftovers glue-ins could also be used in other projects across Saudi, which is primarily composed of soft sandstone. We eventually went with glue-ins.

The Area

Initially the goal was to develop one area near Riyadh, and another near Jeddah. However after scouting a number of locations around Riyadh, I found the areas to be too loose, too remote, too small, or a combination of all three. I read reports about potential areas near Jeddah, and flew out there with a friend to check them out. We drove Jeddah to Taif along the northern road crossing Mecca and through Alhada and towards Taif. Nothing was big enough.

At the end of the day we drove to Al Shafa, a popular nature area southwest of Taif, where David Black, one of the early climbing explorers in Saudi, reported a climbing area among expats in the 90’s and early 00’s. I had been in communication with him for a few months, and he flew out to Saudi to help scout locations. There, next to Jabal Al Qaraniyat, we rediscovered Olympic Crag. Steep, hard rock (granite), and enough for at least 100 routes (see picture below).

The second area was Al Sharaf Park in Tanomah, a two hour drive north of Aseer. The area had been lightly developed in the 90’s by a team of American expats living across Saudi. However, the old bolts had been rusted and were no longer safe to climb on. Nevertheless, the potential was promising. It turned out the rock was sandstone with granite streams, rather than fully granite, and we were glad to have to have chosen the glue-ins.

The Development

The team spent 5 weeks in Saudi, in which they developed 74 glue-in routes excluding extensions ranging from 4th class to 8b in difficulty. A number of routes are yet to be free climbed.

The Documentation

An important part of fostering an environment conducive for the development of the sport was providing easy access to information. The team created a mini guidebook PDF of the areas, including all routes and environmental/access concerns, which can be found here. But as anyone whoever used a PDF knows, they are bad for filtering/search and are too rigid for easy access. We thought about creating a routes app or listing them on a custom-made webpage, but my view was that simple was better. I added all routes to Mountainproject. I also built a map of all climbing areas in Saudi.

The Naming

I had the chance to name a number of the routes in Al Shafa. Many of the names are inspired by popular 90’s Spacetoon cartoons (character names, show names, etc). You can look through the names on the Mountainproject link above and try to match the name/show.

Al Muntahira (The suicidal — thought that someone threw themselves off of it years ago) later renamed to Olympic Crag, paying homage to climbing joining the Olympics.

Al Sharaf Park in Tanomah.

Alex Ruscior on Skybridge in Tanomah

Finding KSA's Real Highpoint

Link: Technical Report Documenting the Results

Link: Matthew and Eric’s Project Blog Post

Last year I had the opportunity to invite longtime friends and fellow members of the MIT Outing Club Matthew and Eric Gilbertson to Saudi Arabia as part of their 10+ year project to be the first in history to climb the highest point of every country on earth.

The project was especially interesting since different surveys listed multiple elevations; some listing Jabal Al Souda (جبل السودة) - which is officially recognized as the Kingdom’s highpoint - as the higher of the two, while others listing the seldom-climbed Jabal Ferwa’ (جبل فرواع) as the highest.

On August 17 and 18 of 2018, Matthew, Eric, myself, and a team of hikers invited from across the Kingdom climbed the two mountains in southwest Saudi over the two days. The team found Jabal Ferwa’ to be approximately 3m higher, at 3001.8m in elevation than Jabal Al Souda, at 2998.7m, thus making it the new true highpoint of Saudi Arabia.

Matthew and Eric wrote a technical report documenting the results, which can be found here. The full trip blog post can be found on Matthew and Eric’s Country Highpoints website.

P.S. I’ve reached out to the Saudi Geological Society on a number of occasions to document the results, but have not received a response.

The team at Al Souda’s trailhead. From Right to Left: Eric Gilbertson, Albatool Baroom, Roua Basaad, Matthew Gilbertson, Me, Iyad Aldalooj, Hattan Alasali, and Ryan Olson.

Jabal Al Souda’s summit is located behind a communication tower, next to some cool petroglyphs. Pic: Ryan Olson.

Jabal Ferwa’ is a remote mountain an hour south of Abha, and doesn’t have a trail.