GIS Day is once again just around the corner, Wed. November 15. What will you do to celebrate this day of evangelizing the power of GIS and geography? There’s many ways to participate, you can make a webmap of #gisday tagged photos or tweets, make a presentation to a classroom, create a video, host a GIS career day, teach people how to fly a drone, or even make a cake! There’s plenty of ways to share your passion and trust Joseph Kerski (@josephKerski) of Esri to lead the way and provide some great ideas to consider.
GIS Day provides an international forum for users of geographic information systems (GIS) technology to demonstrate real-world applications that are making a difference in our society. The first formal GIS Day took place in 1999. Esri president and co-founder Jack Dangermond credits Ralph Nader with being the person who inspired the creation of GIS Day
Over on the Esri ArcWatch resource, Joseph has shared Seven Steps to Take to Prepare for the Annual Celebration. From Joseph, “There are at least seven things you can do to get your organization involved in GIS Day or personally get in on the action:”
1. Be aware! What is GIS Day? It’s a day set aside to provide an international forum for GIS technology users to demonstrate real-world applications that are making a difference in our society.
2. Host an event. A school, community or technical college, university, nonprofit organization, library, private company, or government agency can sponsor a workshop, open house, map gallery, showcase, career fair, or presentation on November 15 or anytime during GIS Day week
3. Show what GIS can do! If you don’t work for an organization that uses GIS but you just want to promote the technology, give a workshop using some easy-to-use yet powerful GIS tools
4. Attend an event! View the map on the GIS Day website to find an event near you that you can attend. Invite a colleague at work or a friend.
5. Discover the resources on the GIS Day website. Over the past year, the website has been substantially improved
6. Get some geoswag! The first 250 organizations that register their event for this year’s GIS Day will receive a box of wonderful GIS-related items, such as stickers, books, and shirts, which can be used to promote their event.
7. Be a GIS champion! We want to highlight organizations from around the world that are GIS and GIS Day champions and acknowledge them for the good things they are doing. The stories will be featured on GeoNet and in ArcWatch and other outlets.
There’s plenty of great ideas and opportunities here. Continue reading Joseph’s Suggestions for having an awesome GIS Day HERE in this article.
There’s many fine events planned for Nov 15 including:
- Jack Dangermon speaking on the Science of Where
- University of Nebraska Mappy Hour
- Brampton Ontario GIS open house
- North Bay GIS User Group hosts a GIS Day event
- Pitney Bowes GISDay week seminars
- Hang some GIS Day posters
- Discover Story Maps to share
- Find more events!
Follow the GISDay activities, news and updates by checking out GISday.com follow @GISDay on Twitter and follow the #GISday hashtag – what will you do on Nov. 15?
Note, I’ve participated in a number of GIS Day activities over the years. This has included making presentations to my daughter’s classroom back in 2007 and 2009 and I also created a fun video from a presentation I delivered a few years ago (2010) on the topic of location technology… enjoy!
