An Interview with the USDOT GIO

Adenda Schutzberg has a five-question interview with USDOT GIO Steve Lewis up on DirectionsMag.com today. Mr. Lewis, who was with NSGIC in Colorado this fall and spoke this past March at the NSGIC Mid-Year, includes a gratifying shout-out to NSGIC when speaking about the role of a federal agency GIO.

But the part of the interview that caught my eye is where Mr. Lewis explains how his approach to coordinating the use of geospatial technologies will differ from past attempts in his agency, which focused on technical governance requirements.

There were no attempts to create a true sense of community, where the members can learn from each other and leverage the work that is being done across all of the DOT Operating Administrations. The community will, of course, address FGDC and OMB requirements, but it will also focus heavily on sharing experiences and working together.

This is an important aspect of coordination efforts that sometimes gets lost in the bureaucracy. NSGIC has, I think, done a fairly good job of building a community, and many of us working at the state level find that a sense of community and shared-purpose, while hard to measure, can be a valuable asset to coordination.

A Calendar of GIS Conferences

It started as a question: When do the various states plan to hold their statewide GIS Conferences? That question developed into a collection of items in an internal database at NSGIC HQ. That collection generated more questions about the different other GIS and Geo-related events that might conflict with those state conferences.

So we've started collecting a GIS Events Calendar at Google:



We hope to keep this going, and expand on it. We want to give it a home on the NSGIC web site. And a vacation place in the blog's side-bar? Maybe a pied-a-terre on some other blogs?

We'll see.

Meanwhile, if there's an event that you know about, but that we don't appear to know about (that is, it does not appear on this calendar), why not drop us a line?

UPDATE (8/8/08): Many thanks to those of you who have shared event ideas with us! We were also pleased to learn about the Wisconsin Geospatial Events calendar. Who else is using this sort of technology?

Also, we've added the events in list form to the sidebar to the right. Thanks to Jim Lacy for the suggestion!

On Nuturing Communities

One of the things we've learned about the coordination of GIS tools and data at the state level is that it often involves building and maintaining communities of data producers and users. The challenge is to do that within the context of government and to maintain both openness and structure in the proper balance.

We might take a lesson or two from the experience of Matt Haughey, creator of the on-line community MetaFilter, a sprawling, international collection of web-surfers who share and comment on content from around the world.

Mr. Haughey has written an essay (Some Community Tips for 2007) that presents some of his thoughts on facilitating a diverse community.

If you're building a community you have to love what you're doing and be the best member of it. It takes great care and patience to create a space others will share and you have to nurture it and reward your best contributors. It's a decidedly human endeavor with few, if any, technical shortcuts.

The essay is written from the perspective of running a web-based community site, but some of the lessons also apply in the role of council facilitator and in a more general sense to the community leadership roles we fill.