I’m happy to once again be participating in a DMV GIS Day event. GIS Day is still months away, but Cercana Systems is partnering again with New Light Technologies on a “Midpoint Meetup.” Like the inaugural event, it is a free virtual event. The midyear event will be about two hours long and serves as a checkpoint to showcase the continued geospatial innovation happening in the DC/MD/VA region.
The region’s geospatial community has been hit hard by recent layoffs in the federal and contractor workforce, but there are still success stories to be highlighted. We’ll hear a keynote from Maggie Cawley, Executive Director of OpenStreetMap US. As public sector data sets continue to go dark – crowdsourced, open data such as OSM will become even more important than it already is. OSM is already used widely at all levels of government and I’m excited to hear what Maggie has to say.
We also have lightning talks from Adam Timm of Crunchy Data and Nate Smith of Upslope Advisors. Their talks will focus on data integration and disaster forecast modeling, respectively. The main program includes talks by Mario Field of New Light Technologies on enterprise address management and Matt Holden of the Arlington County, VA government on bike mapping.
I will be leading an open discussion to round out the event. I’m hoping to get feedback from attendees on the desired direction of future DMVGIS events as well as to bring home the take-aways from the day.
It looks to be an informative event, so be sure to sign up!
Header image: Map data from OpenStreetMap
