You're listening to a very special podcast episode 738 may 20th 2024 Hello and welcome to a very special podcast this is frank, this is barb and jesse and sue are unfortunately away overseas in japan Having a wonderful time i'm assuming we've seen a few pictures on instagram And if you follow kind of spatial, on instagram, you can see some of those You Well, but it's, it's, it's a bit of a research project team that they're doing and it's awesome.
And we hopefully we back with us next week or the next episodes. I should say to record in lieu of that, Barbara and I are going to give you a bit of a news episode. So first up. The ordinance survey has created a new national vernacular mapping tool, which is a way fancier sounding term. I think tool the vernacular, but it's essentially trying to get at a lot of the sort of unique names that people use particular places and to get that into sort of a big database for the ordinance survey.
We have gnis within the united states and it's got a long history and it does have like antiquated names But the vernacular tool is designed to do something a little different which is include those sort of semantic similar names and and kind of colloquial names that that places may have for example, They have nicknames such as java the hut stink cove and harry potter bridge which are in there which obviously some of them are quite news but In the UK, in the Ordnance
Survey, they have, you know, vernacular names that go back literally centuries. So, it's kind of exciting and there's a lot of, all of our collective dissertation advisor, Dr. Harris, he did a lot of stuff with semantic names of places. So, I think you'll find this kind of interesting, not to send him an email or text him or something. And this is in a replacement for a mapping tool they had for about 10 years called Fintan.
And this was done at the request of the Coast Guard so that Coast Guard responders could, you know, get there in time to know which location they should be going to with greater confidence. What's really interesting to me is this is, Includes so many different features because it's cliffs, caves, sandbanks, coastal car parks, to name a few. So, you know, we have these nicknames for so many different place. Places, I was going to say place names for places, which is, well, it's not wrong.
I mean, they are talking about place names for places, but yeah, it is, there's a lot of variety out there and you know, every place does it slightly different and they have, you know, just different nicknames for places and knowing everyone in a particular location knows what you're talking about, but that doesn't mean everybody that comes to that location or needs to interact with that location. Knows what you're talking about.
And I feel like I say this all the time when the vernacular comes up, but I still remember one of my first ESRI conferences at the UC where the students from Hawaii went across the stage because they had done mapping. They'd gone out on their bikes and asked people, the colloquial names for beaches for similar reasons, because the people were calling in to The emergency response and using a nickname for a beach. And so they're trying to catalog all those nicknames.
So you could have quicker response. So it's exciting to see a tool like this and also really interesting to see all the colloquial names that are coming up. I hope to see a map of this at the U. C. That would be fun. You know, my personal interaction with vernacular names actually started when I was in high school. Most of my family is from a place called Hickory, North Carolina. I was just on the Western part of North Carolina in the United States.
And my parents, well, my dad grew up there and my mom lived there for years and years and years. And my grandparents my mother's side live not too far from a place. It was a bar. And one of the ways that. My parents used to talk about that bars. They would say, Oh, you go to where Wayno's go to Wayno's and you take a left. Well, windows doesn't exist.
It's an old name for the bar used to be called windows and then like many bars that closed down and was bought out and they changed to something else. And I eventually got my parents to agree to it. Used to be called winos, but to them and to many of their friends and our family above that age, that's the vernacular they use for that, that turn that location. And that's a very common pattern you see all over any, any country, any place that the vernacular becomes kind of the thing.
Another project that's going on in talking about like mapping tools is Oak Ridge National Laboratory has a team that is working with members in Ecuador to map the Coca River. They are using remote sensing and drones in geospatial. Because they're looking at, you know, natural disasters that can happen very quickly and things change quickly with a river, which again, we've talked about how they're, they're moving and always changing and dynamic so it makes mapping them difficult.
And they're looking at things like sediment displacement of a lava dam collapse that, that occurred, landslides and the formation of what they're calling the Ecuadorian Grand Canyon. And these. impact a lot of things. You know, they threaten homes and businesses, the impact bridges and pipelines. And they can even take out something like a hydro power plant that might impact electricity that's available. So they are bringing together this international team and experts to map the Cocoa River.
Which has previously been on studied. It's going to be really interesting because they're going to be using high resolution, visual, thermal and multispectral imagery to update, update Ecuador's national maps. And this way they're hoping to work on mitigating the erosion that's happening. It's just so many different things coming together. That need to happen in order to better understand something like this. And the pictures are just gorgeous too.
Yeah. What, what prompted this is a waterfall that's thousands of years old, just went away, went away on February 2nd, 2020. So it's not like it just went away over time. It just boom was gone one day and they were like, what's up with that? And so what, what ended up happening after the bit of a study is there was a upstream of the lava dam.
There was a sinkhole that formed in the riverbed and it's just sort of the, it collapsed and the, the river dropped below the lava dam and therefore the, the waterfall went away. But you know, this is the type of thing where when we talk about in the geospatial realm, no data, no geography, you know, there's clearly a lot, a very vibrant, active evolving geography that's going on with the Cocoa river.
But, you know, we don't have a lot of great information about it other than, you know, maybe a squiggly line on a map. So this is just the deepening of our knowledge and understanding of the world around us. Just another example of it, and it's pretty cool that they can use, you know, fairly modern technologies to do that. Next up is in the news in the American Samoa.
Researchers are starting to use, well, they're doing some studies to figure out exactly the impacts of submarine groundwater discharge on the coral reefs. Apparently it is causing a massive outbreak of, and I'm not going to get this correct, but Valonia Festa Chia Chia. algae, which is, you know, think of it like a, an infection of, for corals. And it's really starting to kill a lot of the corals and damage them terribly.
And these are an important part of the ecosystem around the America Samoa oceans. So what the researchers are trying to understand is what the submarine groundwater discharge, which is essentially a human generated discharge. Into the waterways, what's what's going on? How's that impacting it? How's it making this this algae grow a lot more than it would normally as a multiplicative effect?
What is happening spatially to figure out, you know, how those impacts can have a major impact over use the word impact, how the how they can have a major influence on the growth and health of our coral areas offshore. It's really interesting that they are looking at ways to analyze this and understand it better because it's a component of this is understanding it, but then also being able to communicate to the public and others what the impacts are and how to mitigate them.
And this is something where it's very hard to explain to people about how water systems work, especially how what they do can impact groundwater. And this is something where it's very hard to explain to people about how water systems work, especially how what they do can impact groundwater. And then how that groundwater that might not even be close to something like a river or the ocean ends up impacting something as sensitive as coral.
So it's going to be really interesting to see all the methods that they're using that includes looking at time series of electrical resistivity, tomography or they're going to be looking at the shoreline and then looking at other things like freshwater discharge. So. Just again, another thing that's very multilayered that is using all the technology out there to get a better, better understanding of a growing problem.
A really interesting thing here, I think, is they're using tower based thermal infrared to detect the groundwater sources and the plumes or diffusive sources. Now, that's interesting to me because, you know, we're such a mobile, you know, small M focused world. Now we're thinking about drones, which are using drones and, you know UAVs and that sort of thing.
And using you know, satellite imagery and what name you out there to, to connect this stuff, to use tower based stuff, to, to get an idea of this. I think that's kind of neat that there's, there is a. Utility for a lot of different approaches, and we should probably not lose sight of that fact, which is kind of cool. Also a lot of times we aren't making that connection going back to what I was saying to that the corals are part of what mitigate erosion and flooding on beaches.
So the USGS has opened their William T. Pecora awards. These are presented to individuals or teams using satellite or aerial remote sensing data. So if you know anyone that's making outstanding contributions towards understanding the earth's surface then you have. A short window to get your nomination in there due by June 15th. So please look to recognize individual or group that you know of that has been making great strides in this area.
We cover this in the news all the time and any of those groups could be someone that is. potentially nominated. Yeah, it's focusing on, on remote sensing. But you know, that's an incredibly intricate part of what we do in the geospatial realm more broadly. So I think a little bit like a geo int and the fact that it can be a big umbrella.
So don't be afraid to, you know, think a little outside the box and a little more cliches I can throw in there to, to, you know, think of nominees who are doing some really interesting stuff. So this is a little bit off the beaten path from sort of geospatial, but it's kind of interesting. The air taxi Archer aviation is trying to get progress towards getting FAA certification. And so the idea here is that.
They can have a really small compared to most aerial vehicles, air taxis that will be used in, you know, dense urban areas. Right now, the main area, this is taking places in Manhattan, which is not surprising and they want to expand this to New York and L. A, you know, Chicago, this sort of places, but it's a very small. Air taxi unit is designed to help people fly a relatively short distance as far as flights go. And they charge you so much per what they call seat mile.
So they were talking about from a server to a suburb, to a city Archer estimate that an airy, an air taxi flight would take 12 minutes and cost 3 and 30 cents per seat mile. So, you know, it's about. You know, having the time of travel within a suburb to a city, irrespective of traffic. And if you've ever driven in New York City, you know that there's no such thing as irrespective of traffic. I think it's traffic 24 7, 365 in that city. So. And it's like that in a lot of urban areas.
So this is the idea is to get people in and out fairly quickly. It's kind of interesting, particularly since the vehicle they're using the, they have a picture on the link in the show notes. This is about a year or so old. It looks a little bit like a drone in that it's got a lot of propellers that are lifting it up. And you know, it only holds a small number of people to do that. So it's pretty cool. It's really interesting because they're looking to do this with Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
You know, also here they talked about United Airlines and New York City and Los Angeles and totally different topographies. So this is something that. You know, does cross over with geospatial, I think, in both, you know, the certifications from the FAA, the fact that we've got only so much airspace for doing things. Like you said, it looks like a drone. In many ways, you know we also, I was thinking about, you know, if you have that in that space and then you have drones in that space.
Potentially you know, how are you going to, to keep track of that? So it's a very interesting topic, as you said. So Next up in the news if you have seen the Aurora Borealis that was out, also the geomagnetic storms that made the news one of the impacts from that were outages in GPS navigation systems and one of those were fire. For modern agriculture, which is heavily reliant on GPS.
So John Deere and other brands were telling farmers to, you know, pause using high tech tractors that use GPS systems to program in, you know while this GPS noise, cause it, farmers were reporting it was derailing it. So I thought that was really interesting that this was the, a large geomagnetic magnetic storm. And you're starting to see some of what the, the impacts could be.
Yeah, the really interesting thing here is the RTK systems they have can plant plant precisely to the centimeter, which I think is phenomenal. It's amazing. It's, you know, living in the future, so to speak. And you know, what they're essentially saying is that a little bit of GPS and oil noise can really throw off the estimation.
So even if you have a sufficient GPS signal to get you, you know, to the grocery store or whatever it may be, it can be very fuzzy because as a human, you can say, Okay, I'm at my destination. Even though you're off by 30 meters, 100 meters, whatever it may be, you can say, Oh, yeah. Okay. I see. It's over there. I'm fine. I don't need this thing anymore.
But when you're talking about down to the centimeter of how to plant a particular you know, a hundred acres of farmland or whatever it may be, that can have massive impacts on your yield and yield rates. If that's wrong.
And it's just one of those things that I think if we went to farmers 100 years ago, it would just blow their mind to think that this is, you know, things going on in the sun would have that much of an impact on where you stick the plant in the ground, you know, obviously on growing. Clearly, the sun has massive impact, but you know, these flares that would say change how you decide where. things go on the ground. It's, it's amazing to think of the interconnected world that we're in today.
What's exciting for me is I have a bunch of posters from NASA that talk about how GPS works, that I show or give out to people when I'm working with the public, and it uses the tractor in the field and the GPS to illustrate GPS. And so this is something now that I can add to the talk explaining about the role of GPS and agriculture and understanding the earth. So again, something that a lot of times we don't think about is the, the, how GPS has changed the world.
And a big part of that is agriculture. Yeah, about, it's been 10, 12 years ago now Barbara and I took a trip across country. And it was a lot of fun. And, but I remember when we got out to the Midwest into, you know corn country, as they say, that seeing those big robotic systems that we're, we're doing the planting. And it's just it's the thing of science fiction. I remember reading about these things in science fiction when I was a kid.
And it's just a piece of, of modern day science fiction that, you know, you don't think about how much of the, how much of an impact these relatively formerly unimportant events can be. Next up in the news in Finland, they're doing something that, that is near and dear to my heart. And it's too bad. Sue's not here to engage in the conversation a bit is they're using AR and VR tools to help with Road and maritime safety.
So the idea here is that it's nothing really new conceptually which is displaying information to drivers to say, Hey, you need to know this. There's a thing coming up here. There's shopping available. There's you know, pedestrians happening all of that. All these sorts of technologies conceptually have been around forever and a day. And in fact Barbara and I were lucky enough to get in your car not that long ago, and it's got some limited AR capability in it. It's got a heads up display.
It's very limited on the AR part, but to some extent it can show you, it shows you, for example, the speed limit based upon roadside. It can see, and it can tell you when the stop sign's coming up, all those sorts of things. The idea behind this is to get this on everybody's windscreen. And and.
They've been working in Finland to try to do this to help bootstrap a lot of professional endeavors professional drivers like, you know, truck drivers or, or delivery trucks or things like that, where it's a challenge to get people who are well trained in that area with a lot of local knowledge necessarily. Increasingly. So the real problem they're running to is the maritime industry because they just have a massive shortage of skilled seafarers.
So you have to have a lot of bootstrapping training and a lot of ways to communicate complex information to users. And this is what they've sort of settled on, which is kind of exciting. And in similar news, just in terms of investing in the future for companies and just, you know, logistics, Amazon's Redshift, which if you think about how immense Amazon is and all the logistics involved there, large scale data center.
is, you know, has been using H three, which is they have announced hexagonal hierarchical geospatial indexing system or H three. And this is in order for them to do fast spatial lookups at scale. It was just announced. And it's pretty interesting because there are so many different ways we're trying to handle data to make all this big data out there, this big spatial data usable. And what they're looking at is balancing the big spatial data with real time interactivity and rendering.
So, I don't know much about it. I just have what, what I'm seeing, but we know that, you know, hexagons are one of the ways to go in order to better handle spatial data and they're going to be making this available now in their Amazon Redshift. Yeah, so the basic idea here is that for the most part in the past, we've used geography or geometry to do geolocation. And it's something we're all familiar with. Latitude, longitude. We know what that is.
You know, give me enough digits and I can get you down to, you know, a square foot or wherever it may be. But what they're pushing is the notion of a hex. And so each of these hexes and you can think of them like cells. They really are hex cells, but they're just not, you know.
X by X cells or hex size and each of those have a unique identifier and I think it's It said in the article i'm trying to find it now It's a very short id string, but the idea is I don't know how many digit it is But the idea is idea is that if I give you an id you can find the exact location on the planet and thereby connected All this information via those that that string it's the idea is to get you into the general Area that you're interested in and then you can get into more fine
granular information hexes are not the I mean, this is nothing radically new people have done this in the past, but it is kind of interesting that pushing this down in the Amazon web services and what's driving a lot of this, their argument for hexes is processing time. So basically what they're saying is that if you're using traditional geometries, you might have this particular thing that they did. I'm not sure exactly what analysis they were doing, but it would take 12 days.
But with spatial indexes, it takes seven hours. You have to transfer four terabytes of data, but and with spatial indexes and hexes, it's 1. 5 terabytes, you know, so it's, it's a, it's the idea is to more efficiently use the cloud services that they have available by using this and that's. You know, pretty exciting. One data point there they pointed out is the population coverage with geometries. It's 15. 48 percent with the spatial indexes. It's also 15. 48%. So the idea is that.
Is that we do things quicker. It costs less data. It costs less time. It costs less energy and money and computing resources, but you don't lose any quality. That's what they're essentially they're arguing. The proof is going to be in the pudding at the end of the day, but it's pretty cool. That they're, they're doing this. Yeah, and it is, and they're using CartoBuilder but when I look at the interface that they have, all I can think of is a big strategy game like Civ or something like that.
When I look at the, the hexes on there and the coverage it makes me feel it's a little bit like you're, you know, playing a game across the board on this. Okay, and that's it for the news. This week, we're going to talk a little bit about I'm, I'm springing this on Barbara, so she can yell at me. We're going to have a little brief conversation on a topic, and it's going to be on state law. Conferences for GIS and things that we like and things that we think are interesting.
So the West Virginia State GIS West Virginia Association of Geospatial Professionals just had its West Virginia GIS conference called West Virginia Geocon. That is a mouthful people, but that's what just happened about a week and a half ago or something like that, two weeks ago. Unfortunately Barbara and I can only go for one day because of work commitments, but we went down there and we listened to some, some. Interesting presentations and we talked to some interesting vendors.
It was at the State Capitol in West Virginia, Charleston, West Virginia. Typically this conference happens every other year and it moves between Charleston, West Virginia and Morgantown, West Virginia for historical reasons. And Barbara and I have been involved in this conference for more years than either of us want to admit or think about.
And so I wanted to take a minute to sort of reflect on what a state conference could look like, or should look like not just West Virginia, but other places. I feel like this is sprung on me, and we're having an after meeting, but I think it is also very important because, you know, this is something that you see more and more conferences coming up. At the, the state level and beyond regional level.
And it's one of those questions too, that you get asked as a geospatial professional or professional of any type to be involved with a conference. And a lot of times you need a way you're, you know, know what you're getting into. So in some ways I feel like this is a discussion to us.
So, you know, make people aware of the time commitment that normally comes if you are involved with something like the planning or on a committee for something like this because it is very much a year long commitment or longer for anyone that's involved. You know, I, I know about a state conference. I can't imagine a large conference like some of the events that we're going to talk about coming up.
So yeah, unfortunately because of our work commitment, we didn't get to engage in some of the more social aspects of the conference. And we heard from other members that that was a really exciting piece of the conference this year. And sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. And I'm kind know, what Transcribed Is the value of a conference the non conference time or is the value of a conference the conference time? In other words, it is just about getting us all together in a room so we can talk?
Or is it, do the presentations help? What do you think? Well, I mean, again, I feel like this has sprung on me, but, but I'll say any conference I've been involved in as a professional that there's always that moment when you feel that you're part of the in crowd in your profession.
When you're invited to those types of discussions that happen in the hallways, And elsewhere during a conference that's where you make your connections that we make, make your collaborations and you meet with people you haven't seen in a while to, to touch base, but also to start networking. I think there's value in both. I think you have to have both because sometimes.
The only time you have to yourself for training for professional development to learn what's going on in your field especially in the geospatial realm where you might be one of the only people within your company or organization who does geospatial stuff. It's, it's your time to be with people who know who you are and what you do.
Even though a lot of times at a geospatial state conference is going to be people from around a broad range of You know, topic areas that they focus on, or they work in. So it's to me, it would be, I'm thinking, would there be space in a state? You know, I think in some states with a larger population where you might be in a room with a hundred people that are geospatial within the same field that you're in and, and how amazing that would be for, for certain fields or industries.
Yeah, I think it's interesting you brought that. I hadn't thought about the scale up question. You know, California State GIS Conference, if they have one, I assume they do, is going to be fundamentally different than West Virginia State GIS Conference, because just in terms of population, assuming, which is a big assumption, but assuming that the number of GIS Users, professional GIS users scales up directly with population.
What's interesting to me is that and having worked with economic development in areas like that, how much we tend to stay within conferences in our region. So we tend to stay with our contingent states. Usually you don't see a lot of people coming from. Other states coming to a state conference except for, for a few, although that number is growing.
But well, aren't there, you know, putting aside toddler's first law it might be good to go to conferences that are state conferences where the state is more similar to you or that would be any region worldwide. So it might be good to, you know, go from West Virginia to a state in the Midwest. or even to another country where you you share a similar topic area, similar issues and things like that.
That's always been exciting to me when you're talking about geospatial with solid waste at an international conference, meeting people like you doing the things that you're doing where often you don't find that Within your own state, just because there's not many of you, so I'm gonna jump back to the question. I started with because I didn't answer it. Which is what's more valuable. I kind of feel like increasingly that it's 2 conferences happening simultaneously.
And I think that the challenge is how do you weave? each conference experience together for you, the attendee. On the one hand, you've got these presentations that are sort of formalized depictions of work that's gone on or things that are possible. And sometimes it's a company that's essentially a sales pitch for lack of other term. But, you know, sometimes it's, this is the type of thing we did for our clients.
Then you have people that are working, particularly in a governmental capacity, going, this is what we tried. And this didn't work. And this is great. And you know, all that sort of stuff. That stuff is really valuable for learning. about what you can and can't, well, top possibilities within your industry that you could apply at home. So the one hand you got that going on, which is really important and very useful.
And I would say, for example, the Esri you see the most important things that I've got walked away from and haven't necessarily been the Esri. And this is not a state conference, but it's a good example of this has been the Esri presentations. It's been the users presentations about, yeah, Esri says it'll do X, Y, and Z, but. When rubber hit the road, we found there was issues and this is how we got around those issues.
So that's incredibly valuable, but at the same time, you have to find time and ability to have those side conversations. That don't make it into the 15 minute presentation, you know, to say, yeah, well, we tried this and this and then we did that. And then there was this pain in the next stuff. And then we ran into a problem with that. And then political side asked about this, you know, all this sort of backstory stuff that don't that doesn't actually make it into the presentation.
That can be really informative, or you end up conversations and say, Hey, we were looking to do this type of thing, which is a little bit like the thing you did, and then they can go. Oh, yeah. Well, we were going to do something very similar to maybe we can work together, partner together to make something bigger, move this in a different direction. And I struggle even after all these years on how to balance that two conferences in one problem, because honestly, it's exhausting. for listening.
Yeah, I was thinking about this in terms of younger professionals, where a lot of times you feel that pressure where you need to attend as many things as possible that are on the agenda but at the same time that where you're going to get a lot of your, your feedback from and sometimes even the, the meat of what's going to get you along in your career is in that other side of the conference and that you might not feel comfortable in, you know, seeking that out.
So thinking about how someone who's a young professional balances that and also how they can get their employers to recognize that as Being an important part of this it's not just about what did you attend, but it's a, it's also about what did you overall get out of the experience that might not have been included just in the sessions. Yeah, I think the good that that's a good idea.
The good notion you bring up about the young developers the young professionals, even older professionals, you know, the older people are tend to be a little more honest about what they can and can't do or know, or don't know. The mid year, you know, mid career ones, I think a little less honest about it sometimes. But it's very valuable for me to, to listen to a presentation. I hear we did this, we did that, and I go, I don't know anything about any of that stuff. I'm so behind.
I don't know what's going on. And then you talk to him afterwards and you realize they didn't either. They just started doing stuff and then figuring out what they could and learned as they went. And you think, Oh, I can do that. So that, that is almost as valuable as learning what they did or the project or anything like that. So I think you're absolutely right. That's. Something you've got to engage with even in any level in your career, but certainly when you're starting out.
And, and I think the, the, that either side of, of a conference, whether it be the informal side or the formal side depends on engagement and depends on, you know, especially at a state or you know, a municipal level where you're talking about not as much money and not as much sponsorship. It's going to depend on the involvement of members who are putting in their, their time also reaching out.
to industry and organizations nonprofits and others to get involved people who might not think of themselves as geospatial. As always in geography, it's reaching out to the groups who might not realize, yes, we want to hear your voice. We want to know what you do but because they're not using the exact same terminology. Or they say, well, I'm using the software, but I'm not thinking of myself as a geospatial professional.
Part of this is reaching out and saying, yes, you're, you're a geospatial professional because sometimes they're the ones that can get the most out of a conference like this, meeting people who consider themselves to be part of the geospatial community because they might not even realize that there's that support network there. So let's jump to another question within the topic, which is what do you think about vendors?
Vendors are an interesting conversation topic for me for a state agency because in many cases they can make or break financially a conference, you know, if you're looking, if you're part of a professional organization or something that, that just doesn't have the resources to lose money on a conference, getting Sponsorships and vendors there to, you know, they usually pay, usually they pay a fee and some of it can be quite substantial to attend there.
And they're doing it because, you know, they expect that that provides an exposure or an opportunity for them to talk about their products and then maybe make, you know, some sales and some, some revenue off of that. So that can be really important, but at the same time, You know, I don't find it terribly, I'm not terribly interested in hearing sales pitches at a conference particularly the presentation level, which I think is a little hard to balance that at a conference.
Like, what, how do you get a vendors to say, to, to add to the dialogue without saying, and for 1995, you can buy that to, you know, I'm not sure how we balanced that well. I, I've actually had Good experience with vendors when they, you know, because vendors are setting up booths, they're doing this, you know, usually professionally for their, their organization or their industry.
It's when you're with them and they just go, they go into the, what they call the blood and guts of what they do when they're talking honestly about Yeah. Wait, that's why it's so hard to say. Yeah, that's why I think it's so important to know that if you're not new to it, there's, I mean, it is going to be a lot of trust. You have to help to really get the message across that, you know, But yeah, cause that's, that's, that's what Caltech is about. That's the way that Caltech works.
They need to know that you're open to the, that type of dialogue. You know, so I, I guess what I'm saying is, like you said, there's two different conferences going on in the same space, they're different places. And one is the more formal one. And one is that informal one of community. And, and part of that is, you know, the reaching out and allowing that to happen. Yeah, for me, vendors are, I think they work best and sponsors work best when they're part of our community.
And I don't mean that. They don't live necessarily in the same state or anything like that. But you know, most of them, most of them, not always, but most of them are geospatial nerds like us and they want to talk geospatial nerd stuff too. And I think that it works better if we're all trading war stories as much as anything. And. I think that there is, I mean, there's utility knowing what vendors are capable of doing and not capable of doing the products they provide.
But also, it's really nice to know that, Hey, you're one of us and you know, whatever the money flows happen because we're talking about client or vendor. That's, almost separate than the, the stuff we do. And and actually do you need to give a, I don't know if it's a shout out or so excited, but I did bring my projection cards from the Kickstarter with all the cartography and the projections on it. And they are the icebreaker that Everyone said they would be.
And people got excited and we looked at cards and then people were like, where do I get these cards? And I told them about the Google sheet where you can sign up and you can trade. And so I think that those that projection cards met their purpose. And we did have the discussion of, you know, did you crack open all your cards to see what you had? And I had it set up.
Say, unfortunately, no. I'm one of those type of nerds that I, I only crack them open one at a time, and I'm very protective of mine. So, yeah, I have, I have an unopened pack right now on my desk. I, I, I keep thinking I shouldn't open those. They'll, they'll be, they'll be collectible on eBay later. You should open 'em. It was a lot of know I should fun, I should, it was the icebreaker. And, and, and, you know, and then people look at it and they talk about projections, which, you know, again.
It's our community. We know things we can talk about our experiences with stuff. And also I'd encourage younger groups to get involved. I went and I talked about a project my students were doing and we were talking about some of their experiences that they had in trying to get a project done on a timeline. And then the, the, you know, challenges they had and for people there, you know, no matter who they were. from a, you know, director all the way, you know, down, they had those experiences.
So they were able to laugh at it in a way they meant, Oh, I understand that I've recognized that. And that's something we've all gone through. So I encourage, you know, young professionals, but even high school and university students to, to attend their local conferences. And don't be afraid to talk to people about your experiences because, you know, we share them. And that's a really great thing about a conference is, is you can share. lived experiences with people that understand them.
Okay. So last point, I want to talk about this little mini topic as I want to think about after the conference, you know, what, what is a good after conference experience?
And this is the piece that I've struggled with my entire career from running conferences like I've done in West Virginia a lot to attending them is like, okay, we had this great interaction and we had this, this wonderful dialogue and I've got 4, 000 business cards in the bottom of my backpack and you know, all these wonderful things. I don't know why what we do as an industry as a people.
I mean, I have to imagine this is true if you're in a conferences for Beanie Babies or whatever it may be, this is the same thing is that. How do you move forward with all that positive energy? Like how do you actualize it into I'm using a lot of buzzwords, but into something meaningful, I don't really have a good answer for this.
I don't know, but I do know that I got some nice short emails after the conference from people that said, Hey, we met at the conference and basically saying, here's the thing we talked about. Here's the link to this. And then wanting to keep up the communication or asking about, you know, other things that piggy. Can be done with the association. I'd like to say I took all those business cards and responded in similar emails, but I haven't yet because I didn't even have business cards.
You know, it's one of those things that sort of went by the wayside and people were asking for. So I was trying to think of, oh, that's right. We, we bring business cards to conferences. Yeah. I, well, I forgot mine too.
Awful. But anyway I think that, that for me, this is a free idea for any vendor, because I think vendors do this better than anybody, because obviously at the end of the day, they have to, you know, get customers and they have to make money and they have to have a business, you know, that's making money. That's their point. They're very good at saying, okay, how do we turn this into something like projects and interactions and functions and all that sort of stuff like that?
And I would love to see a vendor who does this well, you know, your Esri or your Wolpert's or whoever it may be to come along and say, well, this is how you actually do this a bit afterwards.
This is how what stage two of a conference, the post conference should look like and give us all a little bit of an education about How do you move that for us, for all of us, you know, governmental people that don't necessarily think in terms of now I got to make another contact and I got to make sure making another client reach out and all that sort of stuff. How do we go about doing that in a in a positive functional way?
Yeah. So anyway, that would be, I think, a great topic for somebody to talk about. That's all we have to talk about today on the conferencing stuff. Conferences are wonderful events that you should attend and it's a great place to network. It's a great place to learn about what's going on. It's a wonderful thing that everyone should engage in, in my opinion.
If you have any ideas for any events that you'd like to put on the events corner, please reach out to us at You can reach us at contacts at veryspatial. com. I think that's the website you hit. But you should check out these events. So the 2024 EO for African symposium is taking place September 23rd through 26th. And for us, Scotty, Italy, there is a call for abstracts that's open. And if you're in Portland, Maine, October 7th through the 10th there's a current call for abstracts for this.
It's the ERISA GIS pro 2024 conference. ERISA's GIS pro conference is really good. I very much enjoy that one. That is something that if you have the opportunity to hit it up, you should. I've gotten the order of this out of my mind. See, it's, it's, it's, we're thrown off without Jesse and Sue. So hopefully get back from Japan soon to help us do this. If you'd like to reach us individually, I can be reached at Barb at very spatial. com. You can reach me at Frank at very spatial. com.
You can reach Sue at Sue at very spatial. com. And Jesse is available at kind of spatial. com. And as I mentioned earlier, because I set it out of order, you can reach find all of our contact information at contacts at very spatial. com. As always, we're the folks from very spatial. Thanks for listening. And we'll see you in a couple weeks. We. City lights that burn so bright, Starry nights in countrysides, We'll find all we need in this life.
No matter where we go, At the end of every road, There's a blue. We'll be side by side and we'll let the sunset glow. Carry us home. Every road we wander on. Black of night to gold of dawn. We will see all that we could be. The journey is coming down and we found where we belong, we'll know it carried us home. As the world goes by, we'll be side by side and we'll let the sunset glow, carry us home. As the world goes by, we'll be side by side and we'll let the sunset glow, carry us home.
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