URISA: Themes

After a day of sessions and talks in the halls, I’ll offer up three themes from URISA 2007:

1) Reclamation of geospatial - There’s a sense URISA (and frankly the broader geospatial community) feel a need to grab onto and hold tight the idea of a geospatial discipline. Several topics covered formally and informally support my assertion I think: the work on/discussion of/and use of the Body of Knowledge (let’s define what we do), the URISA Leadership Academy (let’s better eduate our leaders to promote and lead the way forward, not necessarily from a tech, but a management perspective), certification (let’s acknowledge to the world “what we know”), concern about others moving into our space (surveyors in particular - though I saw none present), the historical look at the 1967 New Haven Census Use Study (let’s define, document our past to help define our present and future).

2) URISA is not technical - At one time I think the conference was more focussed on technology. When I was at ESRI I considered URISA as “User Conference Part 2” since we retold and redemoed the same material for a new audience. That’s not really happening; the ESRI user group meeting included a very short recap of some User Conference themes but was really about networking. No vendor I spoke with had a technology announcement. Several conversations in the halls helped me confirm the URISA is redefining itself around policy and more management/leadership education. That focus may be part of the reason numbers are dropping off. Fewer people in our industry need those types of skills compared with the relatively large number who need to use, program and interact with software day to day. Those people, I think, are spending their conference dollars on technical conferences, that is, vendor conferences.

3) Government is conservative and thus so is URISA. The topics of the conference are not cutting edge: the lack of mention of GAMY and the lack of presense is one indication. The topics of concern I listed from the first plenary are not new (we’ve certianly not solved them, but they are not cutting edge new problems). URISA members need to see and want to be involved in longterm change and that’s a good role for them. The downside: I saw far more gray hair in the sessions and few upstart young people.

[Disclosure: URISA covered my lodging for this event.]