Hitting the Road — Conference Season 2013
This fall has been a busy time for me and I’m enjoying it. Less than two weeks ago I was able to give the keynote at the 2013 North Dakota GIS Users Conference in Grand Forks, ND. This trip was special for a couple of reasons; I picked up some UND Hockey gear, got to meet a ton of new people, and now I can safely say I’ve been to all 50 states. Yes, North Dakota was the last one on my list after an airplane malfunction allowed me to add a night in West Virginia to the list earlier this year. You might say I had a fracking good time up in North Dakota (get it?) and I’m totally looking forward to going back, especially since the weather was beautiful. Must be like that year-round.
This week I’m headed to the 2013 AGIC Education & Training Symposium up in Prescott, AZ. I do love myself a symposium, that’s for sure. It’s basically the Arizona State GIS conference but I guess you can’t call it that. I’ll be giving a talk on Using OpenStreetMap in your GIS Project which will be full of practical points on getting the most value out of OpenStreetMap.
Next week I’m keynoting the Manitoba GIS User Group 2013 Conference (I guess not everything is a symposium) on October 2nd. I’ll be giving a talk on staying relevant to technology changes but still calling yourself a GIS professional. Again, lots of good stuff but I don’t want to spoil it. I can guarantee that there is 100% no pictures of cats in my presentation.
And lastly, I’m keynoting the GIS in the Rockies 2013 conference in Denver, Colorado October 9 and 10th. I’ll be giving the same talk as the MGUG conference but there won’t be any French in the slides (or jokes about Maple syrup). We’ll look at ways to embrace the new cool tools everyone is using but keeping within workflows that are usually out of your control.
Hangouts with James Fee:: When I Grow Up
Thanks to Steve Citron-Pousty for joining me live from FOSS4G to talk about FOSS4G, QGIS 2.0, Boundless/OpenGeo, and other geo topics. Steve had been preparing all week to bring us his insights into FOSS4G and what you should know what is going down. We also talked about all the new company names, board members, and other business of geo topics.
Hangouts with James Fee:: When I Grow Up
Thanks to Steve Citron-Pousty for joining me live from FOSS4G to talk about FOSS4G, QGIS 2.0, Boundless/OpenGeo, and other geo topics. Steve had been preparing all week to bring us his insights into FOSS4G and what you should know what is going down. We also talked about all the new company names, board members, and other business of geo topics.
Hangouts with James Fee:: The State of The State of The Map
Steve Coast joined me to talk about his move to Telenav, the MapClub initiative, and the status of his Kickstarter project. MapClub is a new organization to assist in getting things done in the OpenStreetMap project.
Hangouts with James Fee:: The State of The State of The Map
Steve Coast joined me to talk about his move to Telenav, the MapClub initiative, and the status of his Kickstarter project. MapClub is a new organization to assist in getting things done in the OpenStreetMap project.
GIS is Complicated By Design
I was going over some work last week with a colleague and they mentioned to me that basically every GIS package they own or use (proprietary or open source) is complicated and requires lots of training. I really didn’t have any response other than to nod my head knowingly. GIS software is hard to learn and use. I still to this day have problems using ArcGIS or QGIS let alone PostGIS or Oracle Spatial. We almost seem surprised when something we do works.
But why is this? Is GIS by its design just complicated? Possibly, at least the analytical aspects can be. Cartography is pretty strait-forward but the minute you start rolling out your script that calculates some impact on some area of the earth, all hell breaks loose. I’m a big fan of FME and it comes naturally to me, but you don’t just pick up the tool and start using it without some training. That goes for ArcGIS, QGIS, PostGIS or anything else.
Now lets be honest here. It isn’t a problem with just GIS. Drop me in some financial software and I’ll just randomly click around in hopes of paying an invoice. But as we discussed last week, GIS seems stuck in the same way of doing things. AML -> Python? Same way we did things 20 years ago. ArcView 3.x -> QGIS? Same crazy terminology…. We’ve seen some cool stuff with visualization and web mapping, but that’s more mainstream and possibly more controlled. I guess this is a way of our industry protecting its own.
That said, I often wonder why we don’t see more people pushing the envelope with workflows. I find myself looking for the crazy ones in our space. We’re littered with them and I’m going to try and focus on using more of their ideas in my own workflows. This isn’t about how bad things are, but how great they can be. As Steve Jobs says in that video, “…the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” We hear about them, look at their GitHub repository and tweet, “Freaking awesome”. Yet back we go to the same old, same old. I think the crazy ones in our space are changing GIS and I want to come along for the ride.
GIS is complicated, only because we accept it.