Every now and again one word, just one, turns me upside down. This word apparently haunted me because its use popped up 15 hours after I read it in an article in ArcNews. I was running and began to think about it. Once I got home I retrieved the issue of the publication from the recycling pile to re-examine it. Yes, the term was there, but it was not alone. Here’s the sentence, from an article by Daniel C. Edelson about National Geographic’s efforts toward geographic literacy, that hibernated during those hours and jumped up at mile two of easy run:
We are reaching out to the ESRI community, the largest organization of GIS professionals in the world, to engage you in this important campaign.
Do any of those words give you pause? I got stuck on the word “organization.” All the rest of words were ok, though we could argue about professional, I guess… The work organization seemed wholly out of place to me. An organization, to my mind, is a group someone joins; it has a mission and some sort of leadership. My band, running club, and Directions Media, for whom I work, are all organizations. My involvement in each means I subscribe to some rules, receive privileges and support their goals.
While I see the users of ESRI products as a community (as I do readers of Directions Media, those who like skateboarding, or those who play the tuba), I do not see those people as part of an organization. That’s another hallmark of an organization: it’s typically visible and members work together. While I’m sure there are many invisible organizations, I’m aware of many “secret societies” because, well, they don’t want to be that secret!
No, for whatever reason, neither ESRI, nor its users have created an organization for its users. Autodesk, if I recall, did start and support NAAUG (North American Autodesk User Group) now called AUGI (Autodesk User Group International) but that’s its own entity now. ESRI does promote User Groups by industry and hosts events for them. Many regional ESRI conferences exist and are supported by ESRI. Still, there are no card-carrying members of a user organization, as there are for say, National Geographic. The other groups Nat Geo is inviting to participate in its efforts include the Alliance Network (funded by Nat Geo), the Association of American Geographers (AAG), and National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE). Those are organizations.
I don’t expect the response from the ESRI community to be any different from members of these organizations. I wonder if working with National Geographic would be easier for National Geographic if there was an actual organization.
