By the time you read this I will be sitting in the outskirts of Nashville Tennessee for the annual State Wide GIS Conference. I’ve attended this conference for the last 15 or so years off and on. There were come years I missed – some I went joyfully…some I just went.
One time….maybe 3 times I was a vendor. A few times I was a business partner of some sort with the conference. Lately I just go to see people I hadn’t seen since last year. Given 2025’s health excitement on my part the “seeing people” is basically why I am here.
This year will fun for me for 2 reasons. I’m pretty sure this was unintentional BUT the two keynotes:
- Maggie Cawley with OSM US will be keynoting. In fact we are doing a workshop on OpenStreetMap. I’ve done OSM workshops before and generally they are interesting to say the least. You have to explain why you’d want to map something and not get paid for it. Generally for me it’s good outdoor exercise. I go walk and map and just do things. A completely (for me) manual process.
- Next up an unknown for me – but ESRi will be there with Greg Brunner and I assume the discussion will be about AI. Which will be interesting because this is the 4th year (maybe 5th) I’ve heard about the AI Strategy. In short the message has went something like this:
- “With AI any one can do GIS so you don’t need trained people to do it.”
- “With AI you can supplement your existing non-replaceable workforce with any one”.
- “Ai will help your non-replaceable workforce do more with what little time they have”.
So you have a discussion of a process driven by humans and a process driven by computers. What’s my opinion? I should have one. I’ve toyed around with AI. I’ve done a lot of mapping with my computer. On the one hand your metadata will read “Compiled by the HAL 9000 because we ran it on a Monday using X and Y” and one bit might read “Compiled by Andy Dufraine on Monday to figure out this problem in which we used datasets X and Y”. I tend to want to know the human aspect of things BUT I also have watched the slow march of tech over 30 years.
Anyway – conference is packed. For some reason over the last few years the conference has gained somewhat of a new life. Give credit to the organizers. Give credit to the pervasive nature of GIS. Who knows.
