Geofoolery

I'm home after a busy second and final day of the Illinois GIS Association's Fall Conference. The highlight of the day was the open source GIS presentation which I'll get to in a bit.

I began the day by attending a plenary speech given by Dan Wilcox, Illinois' State GIS Coordinator. Dan spoke about open government, particularly the value of open geodata, in light of stimulus tracking. He also discussed the challenges Illinois state government faces in consolidating a disparate geospatial infrastructure scattered across various state agencies, and the challenges inherent in implementing better statewide coordination. Just having someone in his position after years of lackluster efforts in statewide GIS coordination is reason enough for me to be optimistic that good things are and will continue to happen despite many challenges.

We were up with our open source presentation in the next time slot. The presentation was intended for an audience that may not be very familiar with open source options. Due to time constraints we could provide only a very general overview of the open source apps we're most familiar with, but the presentation was extremely well-received with a number of people in the audience clearly expressing some enthusiasm for the topic. We were careful to stress that like anything else open source has its pros and cons, as well as that it may not be a solution for all use cases. In other words, although YMMV, open source GIS had advanced to the point where many viable options exist that are worth at least investigating. The presentation is at the end of the post.

The last presentation I was involved with was a panel discussion on GIS in local government. Hopefully it was as entertaining and hilarious for the audience members as it was for the panelists, but we may very well have thought that we were funnier than we really were. The variety of topics covered was broad, ranging from issues upgrading to ArcGIS 9.3.1 to regional user groups to the GISP to data distribution policies. Social media was discussed briefly in relation to how the two major ESRI user groups in Illinois could better engage their membership. Both groups still use e-mail lists, but it was clear that there was interest in trying to use social media to go beyond the e-mail lists.

All in all, it was a very good conference. I'm looking forward to ILGISA's spring conference and will likely participate as just an attendee since I could use a break from presenting. :-)