The Regional conferences for TNGIC are picking up steam. Here’s the abbreviated description:
East Tennessee: After a few missteps this one is back on the schedule. It will be held in Knoxville this year on the UTK Campus (specifically the Carolyn P. Brown University Center). The Date is October 8th.
Middle Tennessee: November 3rd and 4th at the Rutherford County Agriculture Center in Murfreesboro Tennessee. The first day will be presentations and the second will be workshops. I’m planning on hosting a workshop the second day.
Magic (West Tennessee): November 18th and 19th in Germantown Tennessee. The theme will be “GIS Miracles in the Workplace”. I’m guessing a robe clad Jack Dangermond is going to rise from Graceland and heal your personal geodatabase. Hehe. I’m going to try to make this one. Excuse my joking – this is an excellent conference to attend.
Since I know the guy doing the web page for TNGIC – please look there for more announcements.
Every state for the most part has a GIS users group. Some have more than one. Tennessee has in essence one with a bunch of smaller subchapters. They might have two soon – but that’s a different story for another time.
A few posts ago I went on a rant about websites. I really don’t like doing them. I do but I don’t. I ran for the TNGIC board a few months back and became the head of the web and data committee. I have a chance to lay my hands on the web part (not so much the data…yet).
Does every organization need a website? It was the first thing I did when I started my business. TNGIC had one that was bit messy. So I consolidated everything under a joomla framework and have what I consider to be a a fairly decent base with which to work. If you haven’t seen it check it out – I’m open for suggestions. The slideshow on the front page is gong to have to go – it’s too unstable. So I need to find something usable (and free) with which to replace it.
If you also notice when you go to TNGIC.org and you get redirected to tngic.dreamhosters.com. I haven’t said much about the hosting company. I will now. I rotated around to a couple of different companies – I settled on Dreamhost. For a non-profit group they host your site for free. YES FREE. Plus their support is really really really good. They have helped me out more times than I care to mention and do so in a way that would make you think they don’t work with servers/websites/computers all day. I wish I was as cool as they are…… Anyway – if you’re looking for hosting – I highly recommend them. I don’t recommend things often – so take that as a good thing.
On August the 14th – a little over two weeks ago – the US State of the Map conference was held in Atlanta. It was excellent – I think it will be one of those events where I will say “I was there” 5 years from now.
OpenStreetMap has been one of those things I’ve had a hard time wrapping my head around. It took me months to get comfortable editing. Once I did I found it hard to stop. I’ve made more mistakes than I care to admit. I’m trying to decide now how to fix some attribution mistakes I made in adding data. I think I’ll have to take the “eat the elephant approach” to fix them – but they will get fixed.
The big thing that struck me about this conference was….well two things.
The first was how these guys (non-gis people) were doing in essence GIS work. They had the luxury of not being bothered by all the stuff I worry about – and because of that they made an excellent map. I’ll toss data if I think it is bad. I would rather have no data than bad data. It actually got me to think that maybe bad data isn’t really all that bad – no data is the problem. If you have nothing – you truly have nothing. Anything is better than nothing (in most cases). I really began to understand the term “Crowd Sourcing”.
Second – OpenStreetMap is changing. The idea behind GIS data is changing. I watched Learon Dalby stand up in front of a group of maybe 100 people and offer all the roads in Arkansas to OSM. Free. No License. No Nothing. Take them please. There was dead silence in the room. It was beautiful. In reality – what good does it do a state/county to collect data and then do nothing with it…except sell it…oh yeah and serve it out in a map over the internet. Give it away – give it to Google, give it to OSM……Make it available to the people. Learon’s reasoning…the New Madrid Fault. When it lets loose what will we use for the rescue? The data he has given away. Look at Haiti and what happened. There was no data for rescuers. The New Madrid earthquake will make Katrina look like it never happened.
I watched as a representative of the US Census made a case for using the map and the data and contributing back to the map. I watched as representatives from local US Gov’t made cases for using the map and the data and contributing back to it. I found it interesting that both talks centered around this approach. Use the data – contribute back. Not get the data and share it out from an overpriced server with a flex front end.
I found it to be more interesting to watch the people in the audience. People I thought would be really overjoyed at this – didn’t seem to be. It was interesting….possibly a bit telling as to the internal state of OpenStreetMap. I like the politics of mapping – it’s always been a guilty little pleasure. How do people react…how do they not react…..how good is your poker face. Mine is terrible. I guess that’s why I try to watch everyone else in the room.
So OSM is starting to serve whether it likes it or not as a…a National Map of sorts. A data repository. A place that data can be stored and shared. It wasn’t built for this and the concern was evident at the conference. What do you do? My gut feeling is the recent deal with MapQuest is going to result in a better backend for OSM. I really think Google should take notice. Google should help. After all – The opposite of “Do no Evil” is “Do all Good”…correct…maybe. This would be a good thing to do.
Anyway – I’m rambling a bit. It was an excellent conference. Oh yeah – the price for admission. $35 dollars.Yes. $35 dollars.
I watched OSM grow just a bit in the US. Actually I think it grew a lot in two days.
It’s been a while since I blogged about much of anything. I’ve been busy. It’s a good thing. Mostly.
Owning a business can be a bit of a hassle. It’s fun – but it can be a bit overwhelming if you’re not organized as I discovered over the last month. If you notice – and you might have and might not have – the blog address changed from www.wordpress.northrivergeographic.com to blog.northrivergeographic.com. You might might have noticed the website has changed just a bit at http://www.northrivergeographic.com . I’ve been simplifying things. The website is less wordy – and a little less confusing. Simple is better. I’ve been preaching simple to my clients – Keep it simple and effective. I wasn’t practicing it. It’s going to change still (both blog and business site) – but it’s going to build off small and effective.
Changes are afoot. Good changes. I had a plan. The plan got me to right about here. Actually the plan will take me just a hair bit farther down the road. So it’s time to start up a new one.
For those of you whose have watched over the last year an a half you watched quite the roller coaster. Works pick up – work drops off. Things happen. Life happens. The unexpected things I’ve experienced has made for quite the spectacle. Misery has been high – so has the joy…or euphoria….or whatever you call it. I’ll call it “Not Misery”.
The problem that is starting to present itself and this will sound crazy for the few followers: to grow or not to grow. That’s kinda where I’m stuck at this point. Get bigger or stay the same. Do more or Do the same. It’s a good problem. No – I’m not rolling in cash. I would argue that’s the trade off for doing what you love – you don’t have to make a lot to be happy.
I’ve been terribly distracted over the last little bit. I’ve disappeared. I’ve not gotten things done that I said I would get done. The end of my original plan has been in sight since mid summer. I’ve started sketching out plan #2. This plan is going to be bolder than the last. Hence the changes. I will argue I’ve gotten more focused. Focus is something I have not had the luxury of affording till now. As a business you take risks and start feeling out for whatever niche you can occupy. I’ve tried a lot and hacked off some competitors and made friends of others. I’ve found a niche I believe – or at least something that feels right. I think. Like I said – Plan #2 is being written now.
Anyway – I know this wasn’t the best post in a while – consider this one a transition from old to new. Expect more personal posts – expect more technical posts – expect a little bit of everything from here on out.
One of the more active groups in Tennessee – NetGIS – is having a meeting this Friday in Kindsport TN. If you haven’t made a meeting you’re missing out….and it appears that I will be missing out as I’m attempting to resolve a scheduling conflict for that day.
The biggest problem I had starting out as a business, well actually there were several, was my stupid website. I hand coded the first two iterations of it, I spent maybe a day a week adding and stroking and manipulating it. When that got to be too much I explored Drupal. When that got to be a bit much I jumped to Joomla.
Last week I had this really great idea that I would actually consolidate everything down to wordpress. So I took the site offline – backed it up – and re-did it in wordpress. If you were lucky enough to see it up last weekend you probably were worried or overjoyed that I had been overtaken by hackers.
After 48 hours I had to give up – I was making no headway. So I bailed and jumped back to Joomla and decided to “redo” what I had. So the site has been offline for a week. I’m back up. It looks more or less the same – but the backend is alot smoother. I’m not super happy with it – but I came to this conclusion: I’m not a web developer.
I spend a lot of time complaining that non-GIS people should let the GIS people work/develop/help. I now completely accept that web development professionals should be doing web development. I am not one. I am better at it than I am at Electricity and Plumbing though – but that’s another story for another time.
I spent a week offline and a lot of extra time that I didn’t have to get this back up. So – since I’ve been missing I’ve actually stored up a lot of things I want to discuss with the 3 of you that read this site.
Gather round Children…..lets talk about some really old stuff…..
So way back in the early 90′s (really not that long ago), Young Randy started his GIS career. When I first started out there was this company called Intergraph that pretty much ruled for mapping in the agency for which I worked. They are right down the road from Chattanooga in Huntsville Al. You had all this very boring looking software running on very complicated computers of which I had no clue. The only clue I did have is that we used Intergraph software in combination with Microstation to map stuff. We had 1 or 2 onsite techs. Arc/INFO eventually shut them out. It was a bit sad – a local company gets dumped for a non local company….but that is the way it works.
So about that same time (or a little later) I had to take a trip to Muscle Shoals and printed out my maps from Mapquest. Mapquest rocked. No more fooling with giant Atlases for me – I would print out where I needed to go when I needed to go there. If I remember correctly, and I most certainly don’t, that same trip I passed Intergraph off the side of the interstate while holding my Mapquest printouts swerving all over the road. I haven’t looked at mapquest in probably 5 or 6 years.
So twice in one week the past came rocketing back.
First off – Intergraph was bought by Hexagon. Hexagon it seems is in the business of “precision”. From their website “Hexagon is a world-leading supplier of systems for measurement of objects in one, two or three dimensions.”. What makes this Interesting for me is that Hexagon also owns ERDAS. I’ve had a long standing relationship with ERDAS. I’ve watched them jump around a bit over the last few years as they were bought by Leica Geosystems….. and then Leica Geosystems being bought by Hexagon…… to the re-emergence of ERDAS as a solutions provider for imagery and other stuff (Apollo). So ERDAS and Intergraph are pretty much in the same 6 sided church. ESRI doesn’t much care for wither one. Absolutely nothing could come of this…..or everyone is so busy building flex sites they wont’ be paying attention.
Second – Mapquest just announced a $1,000,000 dollar investment in OpenStreetMap . I can’t remember the last time I went to Mapquest to print out a map. I do remember however the last time I went to Google Maps and printed out a map…and cussed because it was wrong. So is it a bid to remain relevant? Do they really want to make a better map? I don’t know but I am interested just because of all the work I’ve put into the the Chattanooga portion of the map. Plus there is the US State of the Map conference in Atlanta….at which I will be speaking…..
Anyway – two things I had pretty much forgotten about suddenly came rocketing back out of the past this week.
Linkedin now has a Mid South ASPRS group. If you’ve been wanting to keep up with any news or information – please join. We’ll be posting information about the upcoming conference and student paper competition and any thing else that concerns the South East Chapter. I’m the maintainer of the group – if you have any problems please track me down and email me.
