Fame and Glory

There's two days left to submit an entry for the ArcGIS Server Mashup Challenge and the ArcGIS Mobile Challenge. If your planning to submit, why don't you just comment below what your submitting? At least you'll have some recognition in case you don't win. Or does anyone take these contest seriously?

New Deal Mapping

The Wisconsin State Journal has a great article about the lasting effects of the New Deal. I found one example very interesting. I hope that money spent in today's projects will still be valuable seventy years later.

"In 1940, for example, $17,922 was budgeted to "modernize records in the city engineering office." And in 1939, workers were hired to locate and map all the city's stormwater catch basins.

Nelson, the city engineer, is more than familiar with this mapping work because over the years he has continued to rely on those maps to find out everything from the location of sewers and water mains to the building materials used in old streets. Though most of the information has been transferred to computer, one large map is still used regularly, he added. It's a map that shows different street surfaces at the time. Nelson still has staff drag the map out to check what might be in store for workers demolishing and replacing streets."

Finding Missing People

As has been well reported, USA Today had an article about the search for bin Laden. While the techniques described are mostly used to find criminals, I wonder if similar techniques could be used to find missing kids, elderly or mentally disabled persons.


While I'm not suggesting these populations act the same as criminals, I think its fairly reasonable that kids for instance might be attracted to certain areas (trees, creeks, etc.) where they could get lost. Same might be true for elderly or mentally disabled persons. It would be interesting to generate a missing person heat map to help aid in search efforts.

Cost Recovery

Its been widely reported that the California Appeals Court has ruled again Santa Clara's GIS data selling practices. I've mentioned the case several times before. More locally, Wisconsin has the WIREdata case, which has also been previously discussed. Just this month the State Cartographer's Office issued an analysis of the case. While the WIREdata case is not as clear-cut as the Santa Clara case, it does seem lean away from cost recovery practices (selling data for more than strict cost of reproduction).

Now may be a good time to shift away from charging people who use and benefit from the data, and start charging people who cause the data to change in the first place.

Favorite Non-GIS Blogs

Here's some of my favorite blogs that are not specifically about GIS, but touch on related stuff (and sometimes even GIS) often enough to keep me coming back for more:

(In no particular order)
Digital Urban - Visualizing city environments
Flowing Data - Turning data into art
Community Indicators - All about measuring what makes places great
Microsoft Live Labs - See what the big Gorilla is cooking up
O'Reilly Radar - Watching IT trends
EveryBlock - Public data for the masses
Where - Urban life, infrastructure and visualization
IT Survivor - Planning and Managing IT

Got you own favorites? Add them as a comment.

EWUG 2009 Conference

The date and location for EWUG 2009 has been selected!

We'll be at the Paper Valley Conference Center in Appleton on Thursday Oct 29th and Friday Oct 30th. (This is the same place and dates as last year).

Paper Valley is such a great conference center in the heart of downtown Appleton. It is hard to find another place that is as affordable with all the amenities. I know many were interested in a Madison location. We looked at several options, but they all would have required a substantial increase in registration fees. Given what's going on with conference and training budgets, we thought it would be best to try to hold the line as much as possible on registration fees.

The 2009 conference also represents a major milestone for us. It is the 10th EWUG conference. I think it would be a great time to do something special to mark the occasion. If you an idea on what we should do, let me know.

Last, many people really liked last year's T-Shirt. So we thought it might be a good idea to have a contest for this year's T-Shirt design. The hitch - it must be designed using ESRI software. (Last year's was done completely with ArcMap, perhaps I'll get around to upload the MXD and GDB to prove it). More on this to come!

See in you in October!