NWGIS UC 2024

At the 2022 joint GIS-Pro and Northwest GIS conference, Jack Dangermond, the President of Esri concluded his keynote presentation by saying that "the central problem of our time is our lack of understanding and failure to collaborate, which is challenging our sustainability and threatening our future." This begs the question: What are we going to do about it? Given that the word "conference" means, among other things, "a meeting of two or more persons for discussing matters of common concern," does a typical conference presentation format support effective collaboration? One could argue that it doesn’t, at least not to a great enough extent. In this session, and in a complementary session focused on the lone GIS professional, we’ll try something different. Together, the participants will arrange the room to be conducive to collaboration; they’ll initiate discussion on topics that they feel are worth knowing about, taking something of an “anything goes” approach; and they’ll encourage helpful interaction. All participants will be expected to contribute to the proceedings at some point during the session, offering their own perspectives on a topic of someone else’s choosing or requesting a focus on something of interest. It may be chaos. Ideally, it will be very helpful. It’s worth trying alternative approaches like this, though. And if we make a mess of it this time, we’ll learn from what happened and keep trying on other occasions as we evolve to be better collaborators.