Geofoolery

It seems as if the meat of the geospatial conference, and increasingly unconference, season has once again snuck up on me. The URISA Conference just ended, WhereCampPDX is going full tilt, many state GIS conferences seem to occur in the fall, and I have my own Illinois GIS Association (ILGISA) Fall Conference to attend on Monday and Tuesday in Naperville, IL.

I'm spending part of the weekend keeping tabs on happenings at WhereCampPDX in Portland, OR via various social media while finalizing my own preparations for ILGISA. I'll be participating in a panel discussion GIS in local government that should be interesting. Aside from technical issues, it looks like the panel may discuss a variety of policy issues that many geospatial professionals in local government in Illinois often struggle with, particularly the extent to which the state's current Freedom of Information Act applies to GIS data, how the new Freedom of Information Act signed into law and effective as of January 1, 2010 affects local government GIS data, what costs, if any, should apply to data, and other questions that I'm sure are pertinent to local government geospatial pros everywhere. It should be a good discussion with a good variety of types of local government agencies represented.

I'm especially excited about a presentation my GIS Technician and I will be doing on our experiences with open source GIS. Although open source GIS has been touched on briefly as ILGISA in the past, it is a topic that deserves more attention at the conference as more geospatial professionals become aware of it and begin to at the very least research it. While I may joke about serving up open source Kool-Aid, my intent is to raise awareness of the many open source tools so many geospatial professionals are not necessarily all that aware of, and to present an honest discussion of open source's pros and cons as we see them. Our perspective is that even for those agencies that like mine have made significant investments in commercial off-the-shelf GIS software, there are open source applications that can supplement that investment quite nicely while not necessarily replacing or threatening that investment. An item of discussion I hear quite often at ILGISA is that there are many small governmental agencies around the state without GIS programs that have come to recognize the utility and necessity of GIS, and as such are looking for ways to implement GIS, but have unfortunately encountered severe budgetary constraints that have limited their progress. I hope my presentation will help raise awareness of some opportunities for the development of GIS programs that some of these agencies may not have been aware of. I'll be happy to share the presentation slides with anyone interested after the conference.

As this is my first attempt at blogging, I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes and hopefully being a great vehicle for interacting with many old and new friends