In July 2011, I attended ESRI’s overlapping conferences – the Education Users Conference (EdUC) and the GIS Users Conference (UC). These events connected me with other GIS professionals and educators; new online mapping resources and cutting edge ideas about the future of GIS. Below, I provide a bit more detail on each of these connections.

In terms of networking with GIS professionals, at the conferences I gained insight and access to information about receiving my GIS Professional (GISP) certification as well as a special rate at joining the Urban and Regional Systems Association (URISA), which is the parent organization for the certification program (http://www.urisa.org/about/gisci). Since attending the July conference, I have joined URISA and attended their national conference, which was held in Indianapolis. I am currently working on my application for GIS certification. 

Networking was also a very important part of the EdUC event, and I connected with leaders in the educational community who are writing the texts and lab manuals for the classes I am helping to develop as the School of HPER transitions to a School of Public Health. I met with publishers from ESRI Press to learn when the new edition of the workbook called “GIS Tutorial for Public Health” will be on the market for the latest version of the ESRI ArcGIS software (version 10.x). Though the book is not yet ready, I was given workbooks and materials for health GIS exercises that are currently available for graduate students. I plan to use these in GIS modules that I will be teaching in health courses this fall.

In addition to networking with other GIS professionals and educators, the conferences were designed to encourage people to use many new online mapping resources, including ArcGIS online, Community Analyst, and ArcExplorer Online. These mapping sites are designed for making, saving and sharing maps from the ESRI cloud, but they can be used for non-shared data and maps. I copied one shared map on walkable access to supermarkets below. (According to the person sharing it, “this map came about after asking… how many Americans live within a walkable distance of a supermarket? The green dots represent populations who live within one mile of a supermarket.  Red dots live beyond a one mile walk to a supermarket.”)

In addition to shared maps, the UITS GIS representative and I asked about running ArcGIS software on an IU SharePoint site that was private to the university. Though that has not been completely investigated at this time, we are looking at that option as well as virtualization of the software, which is where IU is going with the enterprise software we purchase.

Finally, there were many new ideas presented at the conferences, of which two were virtualization and integration of mapping on SharePoint sites mentioned above. New this year at the UC were short presentations provided in sound-proof cubicles on the large vendor exhibit area. Also, as the UITS staff member and I did, individual consultants could strategize how to we could use the software to meet various needs of our clients. We plan to meet with others at UITS to determine if we can virtualize this software for use by students, faculty and staff on- and off-campus.