I want to thank everyone for participating in last month’s MSGIC Winter Quarterly meeting. The turnout was fantastic, over 80 people attending! It really shows that we have a strong commitment to the GIS community in the State. It was great to meet several new people who offered support for many of MSGIC’s initiatives. There is always room for more help!
I am excited to see the interest in TUgis, the Maryland Geospatial Conference at Towson on August 7th and 8th. Ardys did a great job answering questions and explaining the changes that are occurring. As part of the Advisory Committee for TUgis, we have been working on getting some great speakers and training sessions for the conference. Look out for announcements in the coming weeks and don’t forget to submit your presentation proposal, which is open until March 15th.
Anthony Puzzo provided a great Esri Top 10 Trends in Government presentation – a lot of good information on what is out there for the GIS community to take advantage of. Shannon and Susan from Spatial Systems Associates, Inc and Jim from Charles County did a very interesting presentation on utility operations and their work order system. I was impressed with the process flow of their V-FIRE, Inspection Data review processes, and how GIS is used. If you didn’t stick around for Anne from Century Engineering and Scott from CCBC, presentation on Drone Licensing, you missed a very informative presentation. It was great to hear what it takes to not only get your license, but to hear about what a responsible license holder must do when using their drone. Lastly, Ryan with ESRGC provided great information on GeoMentoring. Hopefully it inspires some of you to reach out to the next generation of GIS professionals. It inspired me as I spent today teaching two Parkdale High School Homeland Security classes about GIS and will continue to do so in the coming months.
I hope everyone found the Caucus meetings informative. We will take your ideas and thoughts back to the Executive Committee and see what we can do to move forward with these ideas. Please reach out to the Caucus Chair if you have any more thoughts and thank you all for participating.
Again, I want to thank everyone that attended, who presented, and all of those on the Executive Committee and Working Groups that participated. Special thanks to Ashley, Alison, and Julie for pulling off a great Winter Quarterly meeting. I look forward to seeing everyone back in Hagerstown in April for the Spring Quarterly meeting. We are putting together another agenda of fantastic presenters so be on the lookout for a draft agenda in the near future.
Patrick
Patrick Callahan
MSGIC Chair
ptcallahan@co.pg.md.us
