Howdy, folks. It’s time to pack the bags for those lucky few of us who get to go to the annual San Diego Extravaganza. Arguably the best GIS conference around anywhere, this behemoth of a show keeps rolling on in its more or less usual format. 8,000 attendees, they tell us. Wow! In this issue I share my tips for successful attendance, at least according to me!

You will notice that I decided to devote considerable space to an unusual conference I recently attended in Washington DC. Please take the time to read the articles, because I think you may find them challenging and perhaps beneficial. Finally, I start in earnest into a series of ArcView articles and am posting my first freebie software.

What’s your reaction to FGDC and NSDI? "What is it? Who cares?" or "No, not that again!" But wait, something funny is going on here!

A few weeks ago I took time out from my consulting and programming schedule and went to Washington DC to try to gain a different perspective on GIS. I attended the Federal Geographic Data Committee’s three-day 1999 National GeoData Forum: Making Livable Communities a Reality conference. I expected to learn about the latest developments in the FGDC’s metadata standards, and in its efforts to promote a National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI). Instead, I witnessed something quite unexpected: You know all this business about reinventing government – Al Gore’s thing? Well, guess what? It’s actually happening, albeit at governmental speed.

The key speaker was not some bureaucrat or technocrat, but the guru of institutional reinvention himself, Dee Hock. This was not the speaker you would expect in a downtown Washington hotel meeting room, full of Federal, State, and local GIS know-it-alls, let me tell you! So what’s so radical about Dee Hock and about his showing up at the FGDC forum? Mr. Hock founded the VISA International credit card organization in the 1960s. Now, you wouldn’t expect something socially-redeeming or radical from a capitalist who for thirty years was the CEO of an organization that transacts 1.5 trillion dollars every year, would you? Well, Mr. Hock has since "turned on, tuned in, and dropped out." And then reinvented himself. What makes Dee Hock toss and turn in his sleep these days? This:

These are topics that are causing great anguish to people now involved with the FGDC, who are concerned about the continuing discord between the Federal government’s efforts to streamline the collection and dissemination of spatial data, and seemingly everyone else. I believe that the FGDC, which embarked on an impressive agenda of standards and dissemination mechanisms in the early 90s, has made excellent progress. And yet it continues to be treated with suspicion and hostility from local government agencies, who feel that the FGDC is out of touch, too complex, too expensive, among a long litany of other complaints. However, some very high profile players, such as Al Gore and Bruce Babbitt, and many low profile players have taken a personal interest in changing this, hence Dee Hock’s appearance at the conference.

Dee Hock’s assertion, in my own words, is this: Given that most humans do care about their human and non-human environment and do not wish it harm, but also given that most humans realize that we are harming both the human and non-human environment, what is causing this behavior? It is his belief that the prevalent institutional/organizational structure in use today somehow promotes and rewards this behavior by its very nature. This structure, he maintains, is an antiquated structure developed to accommodate the industrial revolution in the 1700s. It treats all systems as mechanical systems, which can be broken down into their component elements, whereupon they can be understood and improved. In his opinion, a more appropriate model for our day and age is one which can accept the chaos and blinding speed of developments in our time, yet impose enough structure on them to channel the chaos into improvements rather than into sheer anarchy and collapse. Here is a simpler way of saying this: Organizations that simulate the natural process of evolution will succeed and help us survive in the next millennium, whereas organizations that will continue to attempt to design themselves to the tiniest detail ahead of time will not. Sounds heavy? It gets better. Don’t go away!

While in Washington DC for the FGDC conference, I had two unique experiences which I would like to share with you. The first was sitting in the third row of the very first Congressional Hearing on GIS! This discovery hearing by the Government Management, Information, and Technology subcommittee of the House Government Reform Committee was chaired by California representative Stephen Horn, and attended by Pennsylvania representative Paul Kanjorski and Texas representative Jim Turner. The witnesses before the committee consisted of such luminaries as US Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, the Governor of Wyoming, Jim Geringer, and ESRI President, Jack Dangermond, as well as a dozen or so local government representatives. Representatives Horn and Kanjorski are apparently two of the few representatives who have taken an active interest in GIS and its related technologies, and were interested in what the community had to propose. Much of the policy recommendations made at this hearing were formulated by the luminaries and the regular folk, the likes of me, who attended the FGDC forum.

Want to do something cool in ArcView? Then float some buttons over a View, a Layout, or some other document. The buttons can move with the display (the buttons are tied to a geographical location) or they can remain in the same location in the display regardless of zooms and pans (tied to the display). Why would you want to do that? Here are some examples:

Here are a few quick observations from attending about 10 ESRI Annual User Conferences, on how to make the most of the conference attendance. See which of these work for you.

I am pleased to welcome the AngloGold Jerritt Canyon Joint Venture (Elko, NV) to my client list. I am assisting the exploration group at this northern Nevada gold mine to migrate their geologic modeling, mine planning, and GIS data to a relational data management system, and to make different software packages that they are using talk to each other.

I am also excited about an ore control system implementation of ArcView that I am newly involved with in an open pit bauxite mine. On this project I am collaborating with Condor Earth Technologies, Inc. (Sonora, CA) to assist a mining company in Jamaica, Kaiser Jamaica Bauxite Company – KJBC (St. Ann, Jamaica).