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GIS

Georgia URISA Luncheon – October 2015

Location: South Cobb Regional Library
George Woody Thompson Community Room
805 Clay Road
Mableton, GA  30126

“Cobb County Easement Update: GIS Conversion Process”

The purpose of this presentation is to provide the audience information about the Cobb County’s Information Services Department, GIS Team, procuring an enhanced county-wide GIS easement dataset, obtained from digital and paper records, of properties located within Cobb County. This dataset includes county-owned permanent easement features such as drainage easements, sanitary sewer, permanent sewer, drainage, conservation and preservation. The goal of this obtained, extensive county-wide dataset is to support the operational missions of multiple departments within Cobb County.

This presentation will explain how the GIS Team expanded on the data that they collected and created over the course of a 1-year period from internal staff to initiation with vendor contracts. During the 1-year period, the easement definitions were defined as well as the GIS database design. The GIS Team recently started their 2-year contract with a vendor to create GIS features for an estimated 215,000 easements that currently exist within paper and digital formats.

Finally, this presentation will also include a review of the pilot project (good, bad & ugly), the compilation of an RFP (Request for Proposal) and the vendor selection process.

Presenter: Jennifer Lana – Cobb County
Jennifer is the current GIS Manager for Cobb County.  Jennifer has 18 years of professional GIS experience from the technician level to the management level. In her current position, Jennifer oversees Cobb County’s geospatial strategy in collaboration with a great group of GIS professionals.
Jennifer constantly stays on the cutting edge of the GIS software world. Jennifer also has hands-on technical expertise in various GIS areas such as Systems Architecture, Application Building, Data Management, Quality Control, and Data Analysis.

Register at http://www.gaurisa.org

What’s in a name……

I’m having an identity crisis.

I was a Geology Major in College. For a while I was registered with the State of TN as a Geologist.

When I first started working for the Gov’t,  I was a SE Technician. What was SE? I can’t remember. You progressed up the ladder from 1 to 4 and then tried to make the jump to something else.

When I made the jump I became a SD Scientist if I remember correctly. What was SD? I can’t remember. You progressed up the ladder to a 3 or a 4 and hopefully didn’t die from high blood pressure or a stroke when you entered management.

When I left and started NRGS everyone wanted me to have a title. You should be President Randal Hale. That was all too pretentious. Correct mind you, but I don’t like being called President. I’ve had people approach me and go “Why don’t you hire me and make me CEO or CTO or something?” I would always go  “What’s in a name? Are you going to answer crazy emails? Or not digitize data if it needs it? How dirty are you willing to get as CTO/CEO?”.

For a while I would just go “Randal Hale, GISP” What’s a GISP? I’m a Geographic Information Systems Professional. Except when you think about it GIS is just a tool and that’s like saying you’re a Hammer Professional or a Stapler Professional. I’ve soured a bit on the GISP and I’m not sure what I need to do to reconcile that in my head.

Then I went through the “I’m a GIS Analyst” Phase which still didn’t answer what I did. I analyze GIS.

As of late due to a  lot of changes in the way I’ve ben approaching clients I’ve started going when people ask “What are you?” I answer Geospatial Data Scientist/Analyst. I’m working with data that has a geospatial component and I’m providing the client with reports/data/maps to help them make a decision. My skill set has been growing as I introduce more QGIS/PostGIS/things to my clients. I haven’t had one yet yell “It has to be in ArcGIS”. Most don’t care if the data is sound. Of course Yesterday I spent more than half the day in ArcGIS. Which was sort of nice ultimately. Hadn’t done that in a long time.

Of course I could just go “I own a small business that makes noise with geospatial data”.

So what’s in a name? Do I have the skills to actually add “data” to a description of me. Have I walked far enough into the database pool? Dive more into R? Do I start quoting statistics at every corner? Do more GIS people need to treat their data as a database vs a pile of files or connections to a server……..

I don’t know. I guess another hazard of Small Business. I know what I do. So what do I call myself. For the record at the last few conferences my job title was Janitor.

Does it really matter – currently not a great deal – it just something else rolling around in my head.

Anyway – all this made me think:

Learn about gvSIG 2.1

So in today’s “Learn something new” and “don’t limit yourself to one tool” – gvSIG. I’m horrible about finding something thought and wearing it out. I did that with ArcGIS/ArcINFO for the first 23 (Holy Crap) years and now I’m doing it with QGIS. I do love me some QGIS though.

So – one more tool it doesn’t hurt to have around is gvSIG. GvSIG has been around for a while – from Wikipedia “The first part of the abbreviation stands for Generalitat Valenciana, the Spanish regional authority that the system was originally developed for. The latter part, SIG, is the Spanish equivalent for the English GIS.”

gvsig

 

If you go back a few posts I did a post on OpenJump. GvSIG isn’t terribly different in some regards. Multiple Views. It’s built on Java. It has Sextante built in as it’s geoprocessing module.

It did take a bit more work to add some data than I’m used to – but it’s not hard by any stretch. You create a new view. You set the projection of that view. You add data to the view (right click in the upper left rectangle of a view) and in my case I also had to set the projection of the data. GvSIG didn’t recognize the projection and I had to define it. Once defined everything was good. Right clicks make the world go round – so to change the properties of any data layer you add just right click.

sigprop

Probably the thing that surprised me the most in my American-Barely-Spanish-Literate self is this program (while having been translated into several languages) has most everything in Spanish. My english version still has a few dialog boxes that are in spanish. If you do any amount of searching you see the community is quite extensive and they have an outreach site and educational material. You’ll even notice with some more digging that their last Conference was numbered 10 and was held last year in Spain. You’ll also notice a large Latin American/South American/Spanish representation through out the site.

Is gvSIG any less significant than anything else? No. Not if you are worried about your data. You can do all your normal GIS tasks and then some with this piece of software. You can even make a map which has a one up on OpenJump. I still like QGIS – but it doesn’t hurt to have another piece of GIS software at your disposal.

I have installed 2.1 – and from what I can gather 2.2 is just around the corner.

So go out and learn something new – download gvSIG and explore some new software. You might find you like it, want to join the community , and maybe donate some money or time into making the software better.

T&M NTE By NRGS

What? Teenage Mutant Ninja What?

As a small company you’re always trying to increase services but not over commit yourself. I’ve done that way too much. A lot of people call me for advice. Some people call and when I mention “Hey – why don’t you pay us…….” the conversation drops and I hear nothing. I get a ton of phone calls about Open Source GIS and Commercial GIS and I provide answers and the people move forward and hopefully do good things.

So – with all of that I’m starting the “Time and Materials Not to Exceed Contract”. There are a few who already have it. Essentially what NRGS is trying to do is give you support but not kill your budget. The support contract is for X amount of time at X amount of hours. If we go over we contact you to proceed or to stand down until next months hours begin. The beauty of this – If we don’t work you don’t pay us. Perhaps you need help in April and Not May. Pay for April. You pay nothing in May. At the end of the year we haven’t gone over the agreed amount. We may not have done anything for your organization (and we don’t want that to be the case either).

  • So if you’re pre-paying for support and are running out of hours…
  • You need help with your GIS and not sure what to do…..
  • You are listening to sales people tell you what you should buy and don’t know if they are telling you the truth…

That’s what we are here for – to help, to guide, to get you moving on a better path.

You stole my scholarship

I put personal stories up here also for those of you who are just discovering the site. I made a comment in my last post that a recent conference wasn’t diverse enough. By diverse I mean Ethnically. By Ethnically I should say African American. By that I mean Black.

The geo world is mostly white. Male. Possibly bearded. If you go to any conference there is a huge push to bring in more women. Rightly so. Women in geo aren’t rare – but they aren’t super common. I think that one will sort itself out quicker than the color of GIS.

So why do I care? Well…..I wrote this once and deleted it months ago. Like I said – mention color and the room gets nervous.

My childhood is littered with public schools. I was one of those kids. We lived in a boring neighbourhood in a part of Chattanooga and that was my choice – Public Schools or nothing. How did I turn out? Well – it depends on who you ask these days. I think mostly OK. Some would argue otherwise.

It was an interesting look back. Elementary school was split as I remember it half white,  half black, and whoever the local church was able to bring out of Asia. As I moved forward that white black ratio changed. By high school it was probably 95% black and 5% white. Maybe.  The school I attended was at one time almost all white. The school was mascot was a “rebel” (as in confederate) and when it was integrated in the late 60s/70s it changed to the “panthers” (as in large jungle cat – or militant group – I could never quite decide). All my friends were there and as a result I really didn’t notice or care about skin color much. I would at times if something was happening and it required me to notice. Sometimes I would notice if there was a social event at school…sometimes if I went to a football game. That was school. Sometimes I would even openly make fun of the fact I was the “token white guy” on an outing. The teachers got annoyed at those jokes.

My first goofy episode, as I will call it, was in 8th grade. My English teacher forced the entire class to enter a black history month essay contest. I like writing (as evidenced) so I did my best and turned in about a two page paper on why integration/black history/something was important. Out of the whole city – two of us in that class won. I took first. The teacher walked in and looked at me and said “Out of the whole city – two of you placed in the top 3….you took first.” I chuckled. She nervously chuckled. I faked an emergency and skipped the awards ceremony at the local church. I regret that 30 something years later. The pastor of the church came to the school to deliver my $100 dollar savings bond and we stood next to each other for about 5 minutes before he realized I wasn’t black. I didn’t want to point it out. He nervously handed me the award and kept looking at me – “you’re….whiiiiiRandy?” – Yes, Yes I am.

The next episode was in 12th Grade. There were many more stories I could tell you – but none as interesting as this and the savings bond. Morehouse college was visiting the school to hand out scholarships. Morehouse is probably one of the more prestigious schools in the south and is known as the college of choice for Black Men.  My Chemistry teacher walked in and said “Morehouse college is visiting the school and you have to go.” ME?!? WHY? “Because you have a scholarship”…I don’t…I’m not going to Morehouse….“GO GET YOUR SCHOLARSHIP”. So I went. I walked in right in the middle of “….We need more black businessmen, black scholars, and….”. I came in through a back door and no one could see me except for the two guys from the college who were speaking. They stuttered and I waved. They finished the talk with “See you at the House” and I just had to say “Yay the House” and the whole room turned around and broke out in laughter. There were 14 of us there – I was #14 and the only white guy in the room. I walked up and received my scholarship and said “Can I have this in cash value?” the answer was no. I asked for half. They said no. At the time my school didn’t do two things – have computers with a database with a “B” or “W” column and check scholarship lists. So – I walked out and one of my classmates said “You?! You were in there?! You stole my scholarship Randy”. You can have it – I won’t be going. Haha. He laughed. We all chuckled going down the hallway. He went I found out years later. I think a masters candidate. Maybe. Regardless he went and should have gotten that scholarship first- but it did make for a great story.

Flash forward to graduation and then flash forward to college. I walked into a school that was 80% white. I felt horribly out of place. I found a few of my old classmates and told them how out of whack I felt. It was interesting looking back. So if you flip the entire last 12 years and made me black and everyone else white….like I said – Interesting. I understand more than I let on some days. It’s quite easy to go “Well I never get treated differently because I’m white”. I did. All the time. So when people say “I get treated differently because I’m black”. Yes. I completely understand. I was singled out for events, felt uncomfortable at some functions, and was just different. For a large part of my childhood this happened. I was the majority minority. So I get it. Better than most I hope. If I don’t I’ve let down 12 years worth of wonderful teachers.

When I started down the GIS path I started noticing how uneven the participation was with regards to skin color. Part of the reason I fell in love with Georgia URISA was I could go to a meeting and see two things: Women in a leadership role and people who weren’t white. My fondest memory was a GA URISA conference where a guy from Kenya stood up and played guitar and sang The First cut is the Deepest by Cat Stevens..in a bar in Athens. I walked into it the other day surrounded by drunk Frat boys..sighed…and walked out.

When I was down in the islands I was home again so to speak. I worked in some very poor rough areas and everyone was black but me. I went to two schools and I saw people that reminded me of my public school past. I found myself thinking back to high school a lot. The last few conferences I’ve been to have reminded me of my minority-majority past.

…and this may all sound horrible if you’re somewhere and you look out at a conference into a sea of multicultural faces. That is excellent. In places where you don’t though…I find it to be a sad indication of my chosen field. The women in tech/gis push is only a small component. We need everyone. Black, Male, Female, Trans, Purple,  and Blue Green. We spend too much focusing on one segment IMO – if we win that one part and we have more women who feel accepted – that’s only one battle won. A good battle won. Only one battle though. I worry some might think it’s “all good” and the war was won. We need more African American Participation. Badly. It’s a never ending affair.

Anyway – I said I would say why I stuck that one blurb in the last post. That’s why. So why ramble about it? Why not. This blog gets a good number of hits some days and if I can “do some good” then why not. If some of you go “I’m not stopping black people from showing up”. I would probably say you are right. How many people of color do we have in the field? I’ve spoken at several college events and I can count on one hand not using my thumb or pinky finger, how many african american people were in the audience while I talked about GIS. In a college. Over the last year. It’s not getting any better. In my opinion colleges are struggling with GIS in general – much less looking at diversifying the field.

So don’t think I’m being negative on any aspect of GIS – be it a conference, inclusion of more women, or getting  three tortillas with an order of Fajitas. I hate on nothing. I love everyone.

Except for that guy over there.

 

 

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