Our first Educational Meeting of 2010 featured three presenters who shared success strategies for developing geospatial applications:

Mr. Michael Byrne, MA, GISP, Geospatial Information Officer for the State of California
Michael gave 3 ignite style (http://ignite.oreilly.com/) presentations centered on defining an enterprise approach for geospatial data and solutions.  His talks were entitled:

The California Policy Landscape; Where Geospatial Fits In.
The nation is experiencing the biggest recession since the great depression, and California is another $20 billion short this coming fiscal year.  The Governor is in his last year in office, and next year’s race is shaping up to be as significant as any we have seen.  Yet the demand for technology is at a feverish pace.  This talk will focus on the high level policy issues we see going on in the state right now, and how geospatial fits into them.  Topics include the strategic growth, water, emergency response, technology growth, climate adaptation.

Minimum Essential Datasets; Delivering Data as a Service
The OCIO was awarded a homeland security grant to enhance the GIS. The grant, part of a larger U.S. Department of Homeland Security grant package, is administered by the California Emergency Management Agency (CalEMA).  The focus of this award will be to stand up three GIS data services for best currently available public domain data.  Those services, known as Minimum Essential Data Sets (MEDS) will be 1) Imagery, 2) Transportation, and 3) Landmarks.  In order to deliver this effort, we focused on plain vanilla.  This talk will describe the value of plain vanilla. 

Cool Applications, Social Media; Why this is Important to Geospatial
We have witnessed a massive growth in applications recently.  In particular cloud computing has changed the landscape such that increases in power have led to a wide variety of applications including very novel geospatial applications, a wealth of opportunity for personal applications (iAnything) and rampant use of social media.  This talk will go through some of my favorite ones, and start the conversation as to why it is important to the geospatial community.

Mr. Jeff Johnson, Enterprise GIS Coordinator, Dept. of Technology, City and County of San Francisco

Getting MAD: San Francisco’s Master Address Database Project
The City and County of San Francisco has developed and is deploying a single, authoritative, and centralized database of addresses for use throughout City government.  The MAD data model allows for every address within the City to be linked to assessor parcels, the street centerline network and potentially to individual buildings.  This ability to track address locations and compare them to geo-referenced data such as parcels is a fundamental requirement of most City departments, and drove the need for a MAD.  This talk will focus on how we defined the requirements and deployment options for the MAD.

Mr. Alexei Peters, Director of Web Development, Farallon Geographics

Defining the Architecture and Developing the City of San Francisco’s Enterprise Addressing System

 

Biographies:

Michael Byrne
Michael is the Geospatial Information Officer for the State of California.  He has 18 years of GIS experience in a wide variety of California state government and academia. He has served as a GIS manager for the University of California Davis’s Information Center for the Environment and as staff to the Secretary for Resources implementing special GIS projects. Michael is a member of the National Geospatial Advisory Committee, a Board of Director for the National States Geographic Information Council and a Board of Director for GreenInfo.  Hel holds a Bachelors of Science in Environmental Planning and a Masters of Art in Geography both from the University of California Davis.

Jeff Johnson
Jeff is the Enterprise GIS Coordinator at the Department of Technology, City and County of San Francisco.  Aside from managing the City's Enterprise GIS Program or SFGIS, he also is responsible for support of the Enterprise CRM application provided for departments.
Jeff has been with the City starting in 1993, where he served as an intern for the GIS Basemap development project at the Department of Public Works.  He has been involved with the City's GIS efforts ever since, first with the Public Works, and then with the Department of Technology beginning in 2002.   
 

Alexei Peters
Mr. Peters is Farallon’s Director of GIS Web Development. His duties include the creation of website logic, layout and functionality, deployment and integration of websites with client databases and GIS web software. Mr. Peters’ has developed numerous web applications using the following technologies: ArcGIS Server, ArcIMS, ASP.NET, ASP.NET.MVC, Python, Django, OpenLayers, GeoServer, and PostGIS. In addition to his application design and development duties, Mr. Peters develops and administers custom GIS training courses for client personnel and has additional expertise in spatial data development, as well as map design and production. Mr. Peters joined Farallon in 2001.