(This special workshop will take place Sunday, February 26th - 9:30am at the Loews Annapolis Hotel - Open to government, academic and nonprofit attendees registered for the Midyear Meeting)

Presenters:
- Jack Dangermond, President
- Bern Szukalski, Technology Evangelist
- Brenda Wolfe, Product Manager, Community Analyst
- Gerry Kinn, Imagery Artchitect
- Allen Carroll, Program manager, ArcGIS Online Content

This workshop is designed to update states on technology trends and applications in government while also learning and getting input from states. This will focus on specific issues important to the State GIS community. Jack Dangermond will provide insights on technology developments and the future of GIS and its impacts on government and society. Interspersed throughout the workshop will be demonstrations, discussions and opportunities for hands on following along on your own portable devises. Some of the featured topics for discussion and demonstration will include:

Working smarter across the enterprise - leveraging a collaboration platform - Building on his presentation at the last annual meeting Bern will provide a very brief overview of the public ArcGIS Online just to set the baseline, but will focus more on various ways organizations can use ArcGIS Online and subscriptions to support collaboration and wider dissemination and use of their GIS assets. It will also delve into how map services can be published from ArcGIS Desktop and the browser applications;

Reaching new audiences with Map Stories - ArcGIS can be used as a communications platform, in addition to its more traditional roles in planning, analysis, management, and decision support. Maps can be refined, packaged, and presented to tell all sorts of stories about the world to all sorts of audiences, including the general public. Users can create and refine web maps on ArcGIS Online using existing base maps, their own or other people's thematic maps, and tabular data. Those maps can then be placed into storytelling templates and published for web and mobile users. A gallery of stories is available at mapstories.esri.com;

Decision support: data and tools ready when you need them - Cloud based Community Analyst provides easy access to 1000's of data sets with intuitive tools to generate maps and reports, a vast resource of information. This resource just got better with the release of the new Community Analyst API allowing you to create your own fully interactive and customizable applications incorporating data sources found in Community Analyst with your own data;

Capitalizing on imagery and Lidar investments - Using a variety of real data sources from New York State, this segment will include a demo illustrating how imagery services can be used to deliver fast image resources in a statewide context, including traditional image carpets as well as project oriented data of varying sources and resolutions. This provides a modern, intuitive capability that can enable collaboration between state and local government organizations and make it easy to incorporate imagery data into more applications. You will see a fast and efficient way to manage and use a heterogeneous collection imagery data. Lidar management tools will also be featured;

Common services and foundational data - implementing the "build once, use many times" philosophy. There are many common data sets and functions that we know are universally needed (basemaps, addresses, parcels...), but how do we as a community best orchestrate the creation, maintenance and use of these across organizational lines and jurisdictional boundaries? Both technology and policy strategies are required to achieve this but the results would be significant.

This agenda is evolving and is being developed specifically to address issues of interset and importance to the NSGIC membership.

All members are advised to white list the following addresses - 'member,' 'caucus' and 'staterep' @nsgic.org in their E-Mail Systems to begin receiving messages from the new NSGIC E-Mail Lists. We have been experiencing a significant number of 'bounce' messages and the list software automatically unsubscribes members after five bounces.

To guide members on the appropriate use of the E-Mail Lists, the NSGIC Board of Directors approved a new policy that is available here.

You can view the full article at NACo County News by clicking on this link.

The available position is officially listed with the title OET Division Manager 1, with Geospatial Information Officer as the working title.

The job description includes serving as the State's Geospatial Information Officer, providing leadership and management of the Office of Enterprise Technology's Geospatial Unit; advising the State Chief Information Officer regarding policy, strategy, and operational matters concerning the unit; promoting and guiding GIS coordination activities of OET, and other state agencies on behalf of the State of Minnesota; and supporting the implementation and maintenance of a statewide clearinghouse of geographic information, data, tools, and services.

The job posting is now available on the State’s web site (https://statejobs.doer.state.mn.us/JobPosting). The closing date has been extended to January 30, 2012.

For over a decade the European Community has pushed for the “re-use of public sector information” – PSI. Studies have shown that this approach has brought huge economic benefits, on the order of €140 billion ($183 billion). Now they want to make data even more available.

A draft proposal was made in late 2011 that will further open PSI data for access by

• limiting the fees that can be charged by the public authorities at the marginal costs as a rule;
  

• introducing independent oversight over re-use rules in the Member States;
  

• making machine-readable formats for information held by public authorities the norm;
  

• including new bodies in the scope of the PSI Directive such as libraries (including university libraries), museums and archives.
  

Europeans argue for open data access with three arguments, not just the economic benefits. There are major benefits for citizens, businesses, and society and for the governments themselves:

• New businesses can be built on the back of this data: Data is an essential raw material for a wide range of new information products and services which build on new possibilities to analyze and visualize data from different sources. Facilitating re-use of this raw data will create jobs and thus stimulate growth.
  

• More Transparency: Open data is a powerful instrument to increase transparency in public administration, improving the visibility of previously inaccessible information, informing citizens and business about policies, public spending and outcomes.
  

• Evidence-based policy making and administrative efficiency: the availability of solid EU-wide public data will lead to better evidence-based policy making at all levels of government, resulting in better public services.
  

The proposal was announced on December 12 by European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes. The press release contains a nice 16 minute video of the announcement and her argument that they are Turning Government Data Into Gold .

As background for the new rules, the European Commission commissioned a Review of Recent Studies on PSI Re-Use and Related Market Developments. It was prepared by Graham Vickery, a former OECD economist. It concludes that the potential benefits of lowered charges for PSI re-use can be high, since low charges can lead to more economic activity, market dynamism, innovation and employment.

    Note: Much of this text was copied directly from the European Union’s website http://europa.eu/