About GIS Day

GIS Day Watch - October 2007

In This Issue

Celebrate GIS Day - Wednesday, November 14

GIS Day is only a few weeks away. If you haven't planned your event, don't worry - there is still time! Follow these easy steps and join the GIS Day community.

Register your event. Registering your event is a great way to gain publicity for your GIS Day celebration and automatically makes your event searchable to those who visit the GIS Day 2007 Web site.

Plan your event. Not sure how you should celebrate? Take a look at some GIS Day materials.

Have fun. Take a break from your everyday responsibilities and celebrate what you and others in the GIS industry work so hard for.

Share your story. Recognize yourself and your organization by submitting success stories and nominating GIS Day heroes.

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Geography Matters Blog Introduces GIS Day Category

Calling all bloggers! The Geography Matters blog now features a GIS Day category and corresponding RSS news feed. GIS Day participants are encouraged to comment on and contribute to posts. Check frequently for GIS Day tips, news, and featured events.

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County Uses Posters to Spread GIS Awareness

During its 2006 GIS Day celebration, Loudoun County, Virginia, developed a series of nine posters demonstrating how GIS is used by the county. The posters were distributed to seven county libraries and science classrooms at each of the county's 10 high schools and 13 middle schools. Nearly 14,000 students were exposed to the posters. The posters encouraged many science and social science teachers to adopt GIS in their curricula, were used in an Advanced Placement GIS class at one high school, and served as a valuable resource for students who were required to make their own maps for a class assignment.

Based on the favorable response from the 2006 efforts, the collection of posters for GIS Day 2007 will be expanded. Read about this event and see the posters.

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GIS Day in Canada

As GIS Day 2007 approaches, Colleen Raymond, ESRI Canada Limited's marketing operations manager and a GIS Day veteran, shares her thoughts on the GIS Day tradition in Canada.

GIS has a rich and comparatively long history in Canada. What makes GIS Day special in Canada?

Roger Tomlinson, the "father of GIS," is Canadian, and GIS was invented in Canada more than 40 years ago. GIS Day provides us with an opportunity to celebrate this Canadian innovation. In addition, Canada has a varied physical and cultural geography and extensive natural resources, making the understanding of our landscape very important to Canadians. Since GIS is an enabling technology to further the study of geography, GIS Day is helping to educate more and more Canadians not only about the importance of geography but also about our natural and human environments. And last but not least, ESRI Canada is fortunate to have a very enthusiastic user community, which has embraced both geography and GIS Day, making the event especially meaningful for participants.

How has ESRI Canada benefited by supporting GIS Day organizers?

GIS Day has been beneficial to ESRI Canada in many ways, but most significantly through our primary and secondary education program. Thousands of students across Canada have been introduced to GIS through GIS Day events in their communities. Teachers have learned the value of the skills that students gain when they bring GIS into their classrooms, and many schools have incorporated GIS into a variety of curriculum areas following a GIS Day event.

We often talk about supporting our end user communities. In regard to GIS Day, what advice do you have for other international distributors?

Spread the word to your user community about GIS Day through a range of communication channels to reach as many people as possible and let them know about this opportunity. For example, we promote GIS Day through our Web site and e-newsletters, but we also provide hard copies of the GIS Day flyer in our user conference kits and include information about GIS Day in the Plenary Session presentation (slides) and at other presentations throughout the year. As a distributor, attend and support GIS Day events that are being hosted by your users - give a presentation, help with promotion, and be there to assist with logistics. Finally, it is important that you allow your staff time in their day if they wish to host a GIS Day event at their child's school, and encourage your staff to be visible in your user community on GIS Day.

Search for GIS Day events held in Canada and around the world.

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Podcast: GIS Day Thrives at McMaster University

McMaster University, Ontario, Canada, is no stranger to GIS Day. The university has hosted GIS Day events for local high school students since the inaugural 1999 GIS Day celebration. In this podcast, Deane Maynard, project manager, McMaster University GIS Laboratory, talks about the university's successful GIS Day events. Listen to the podcast. [MP3-14:34]

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Explore GIS

Consider demonstrating these interactive Web sites during your GIS Day event.

Graduation Rates Map
The Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) Research Center recently announced a new mapping site showing high school graduation rates across the United States by state and by district. Along with panning and zooming, graduation statistics can also be searched for by place or by school district. When you zoom in, placeholders for each school district can be clicked, which results in a pop-up with summary information about the school district, its number of schools and students, and the percentage of students graduating. Click the report link to access more details about that particular school district.

PhillyHistory.org
PhillyHistory.org, an online repository of more than 43,000 historic photos covering the history of the city of Philadelphia, has now gone mobile. PhillyHistory Mobile is the companion site that offers a geographic-based search interface where users can query by address, intersection, keyword, or date to find nearby historic or cultural sites. A list of results is returned to the user. Clicking on any one of the results returns a photo along with a map of the photo's location. The search capabilities use ESRI's ArcGIS Server and ArcIMS software.

Visualizing Economics
Described on her personal Web site as an interaction designer, Catherine Mulbrandon has a very interesting site called Visualizing Economics. As the name suggests, Visualizing Economics is a blog that focuses on taking data from government Web sites and displaying it in a way that can be easily understood. Most of the data is visualized as thematic maps and originates from the United States, although there is one map entitled, Where Britain's Rich and Poor Live. Also on the site is a poster section where informative posters on economics can be ordered.

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World Basketballs Now Available for Sale

After reading about the World Ball Project, featured in last month's issue of GIS Day Watch, many GIS Day participants have inquired about purchasing the basketball/world globe for their GIS Day events.

A box of 30 uninflated World Ball basketballs can be yours with a $300 donation to George Mason University. The basketballs can ship immediately. To make a request, please e-mail Jennifer Maloney at jmaloney@gmu.edu.

Read more about this great idea in the Washington Post and the Mason Gazette and on My Wonderful World Blog.

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GIS in Action

GIS Preserves Family Ties
While GIS has generally been used to map where things are, there are many new and practical ways to use GIS such as choosing sites, targeting market segments, planning distribution networks, responding to emergencies, and drawing boundaries. One unusual implementation comes from Khatib & Alami in Beirut, Lebanon, where GIS was used to generate a family tree. Read more.

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