An interactive session at a recent regional GIS event (see article) prompts our editors to explore how we are trained in GIS and how and if we use spatial thinking in our day to day work. Are we just pushing buttons and following recipes or are we truly using the underlying ideas of how people, places and things behave in space? Does it matter if one is trained in geography vs. GIS vs. another discipline? What's the future look like for those skilled (or not) in spatial thinking?

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John Marburger, the president's science advisor, visited EROS in South Dakota (Joe Francica worked there back in the day) and sees a bright future for the nation's image repository. A new Landsat satellite planned for 2011 and the potential of a command and control center in Sioux Falls means the center may take over some work currently done in Maryland.

- KELO

A job posting for a senior planner for Queensbury, NY notes that "basic GIS skills are expected."

I have two questions:

What are "basic GIS skills?"

Shouldn't a senior planner have a deeper understanding than "basic?"

ESRI is focussing on its neighbors with a new relationship with the Colton-Redlands-Yucaipa Regional Occupational Program, CRY-ROP. The program supports job skill training for high school students and adults. ESRI will support GIS training at a variety of locations. The idea being that those who get hooked can further their education at local colleges and get local jobs. The single GIS class, Data Mapping Using GIS, joins other offerings in medical, computer and automative topics available through CRY-ROP.

Highland Community News

Investigations by the Department of Labor Inspector General reveal widespread use of sole source grants sometimes without appropriate documentation. (report, pdf) The finger points at Emily Stover DeRocco, the Assistant Secretary of Labor for Employment and Training and her underlings at the Employment and Training Administration who granted about a quarter of a billion dollars from the U.S. Treasury under the High Growth Job Training Initiative. You may recognize the name High Growth Job Training Initiative since geospatial is among the areas targeted by the initiative.

The IG found that over the previous six years, DeRocco’s agency awarded 157 grants totaling $271 million under that program. Only 23 grants totaling $29 million were awarded competitively. Fully 87 percent of the funds were handed out without any competition.

Even worse, 90 percent of these non-competitive grants that the IG examined in detail (35 out of 39) were done in a manner that did not conform to proper procedures for awarding such grants. The IG identified 69 procedural errors ...

GITA's grant is among those with imcomplete documentation. I suggest nothing innapproriate was done at GITA; it did a great job of promoting not only that it got the grant, but documenting the milestones along the way.

A $235,500 grant to the Associate General Contractors (the trade association of the construction industry) was justified by an abstract which the IG found to be incomplete, as was the case with a $695,000 grant to the Geospatial Information and Technology Association (the trade group for infrastructure professionals), a $4,268,000 grant to the Home Builders Institute (an affiliate of the National Association of Home Builders), and a $1,877,000 grant to the Evangelical Lutheran Good Samaritan Society.

De Rocco stated that she “strongly disagrees” with the report.

- American Progress

Well-known New England GIS guy Niels la Cour has left his role as Senior Planner in Amherst, Mass to join the staff at the University of Massachusetts as a physical planner taking on the update of the campus master plan. Good luck with the new job.

- Amherst Bulletin