Friday, November 14. 2008

GIS Day Communications - How are we doing?

While one goal of GIS Day is to educate those can attend events on or around that day, another is to simply to get the term and some sense of its meaning/role into day to day parlance. How are we doing based on online content?

The Plainfield Sun (suburban Chicago) offers an event notification, but with the headline "Event to spotlight new technology." There's no real discussion of what GIS is, in fact the acronym is not written out. Still, the nature of the topics suggests something about what it's role; the event covers "how the village uses the technology to improve services by demonstrating some of the applications including collecting field data utilizing GPS, the village's addressing process, crime mapping and Web GIS." I am surprised by "new" in the headline. It suggests to me that either GIS is "new" (we know it's pretty old...) or new to the area (if it is, that's not clear and based on the above discussion, it's pretty entrenched there).

The Sherwood Voice (Arkansas) notes its event and the keynote speaker from the National Weather Service who will speak on GIS and its use in tracking tornadoes that hit the area in February. Cool speaker! Again, GIS is not written out or defined. The article does note local and national sponsors, which is nice and may help those new to GIS figure something about it.

The University of New Hampshire already held its event, its 10th and the student newspaper not only wrote out what GIS stands for but profiled the types of people (700) who attended. Alas, it too stayed away from defining GIS is. I've attended the UNH event in past years; it's terrific!

Camp Pendleton is only to "it's [sic] 2nd annual" Geographic Information Systems day according the the Pendleton Scout and also doesn't describe GIS in detail. I do appreciate the goal, which does not include younger students: "The program was designed to encourage Marines, sailors and civilians to learn about the importance of geography and GIS technology."

What should we take away from these examples?

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I am the GIS Manager at Camp Pendleton. Unfortunately, all of the content that we provided to our newspaper (The Scout) didn't make it into the article - such is the way of competing news stories.

Although a lot of our Marines, Sailors, and Civilians are familiar with GIS, GIS Day is a way to educate everyone on our GIS is utilized at a Marine Corps Installation, thoughout it's different business lines.

I would argue that you should still provide information as to what GIS is, as there are still many unfamiliar with it's capabilities.

Keep in mind that we are a military installation, and not an easily accessible place (such as a city), so we are not necessarily gearing our activities toward children. That being said, we will have 150 5th graders, from two different elementary schools at Camp Pendleton, attending GIS Day. They will be getting a private tour and we have special activities for them.

#1 David Toney on 2008-11-14 11:30 (Reply)

Wow, it's Google Earth Day in Maine.
Monday event marks Google Earth Day
http://morningsentinel.mainetoday.com/news/local/5605075.html

#2 Frank (Link) on 2008-11-15 15:56 (Reply)

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