gis day 2006 :: a field report
so gis day 2006 has come and gone, and, unfortunately, we have very little to report and no pictures from the event! we arrived in milwaukee on tuesday afternoon and were immediately shuttled to uw-milwaukee, where we started work on the waukesha trip planner application. at five pm, we lectured and did a workshop on mashups with prof. peng's grad students.
since the labs are less teachers than hacktivists, our presentation did not go as well as planned and we left campus pretty unhappy. luckily, the margaritas at beans and barley were able to slightly assuage our disappointment.
so on wednesday, gis day, instead of having breakfast, chatting, and participating in the event, we hunkered down in a campus computer lab to completely redo our tutorial. by noon, we felt our tutorial was ready to go and we decided to join the group for lunch, but everyone already had their food and the luncheon speaker, nick fisher, had just started. mr. fisher is a market analyst for harley-davidson and was reading from a powerpoint presentation extolling the virtures of harley as market leader in over 500-cc bikes. within seconds we pegged him as a stooge and figured our time would be better spent searching for cigarettes.
at 1:30 we gave our workshop and the time spent re-doing it was totally worth it: the workshop went well. despite losing five people somewhere in the middle, everyone who remained seemed happy with the presentation and several people thanked us personally afterwards.
since gis day was now over, we headed to the gasthaus, traditionally post-event gathering place for uw-m. several professors and event organizers were already there, but they were having a private chat, so we sat at a separate table. as more people filtered in, a second table was pulled adjacent to the original one. for some reason, we ended up getting completely sidelined and, after a single beer, we decided to leave and go to hi-fi prior to the cory arcangel lecture at miad.
submitted by scientist #56TY63
November 17th, 2006 at 3:35 pm
Hey Labs…
Thanks for your awesome presentation at GIS Day 2006. I agree with you, not sure why you lost five people at the workshop, but everyone else had a great time and everyone was successful at building their own mashup. I have done my own in the past, have looked at the api reference, but the tutorial really gets down to what everything does and how it all goes together. I’m really interested in the potential for real GIS as demonstrated in the tutorials!
November 17th, 2006 at 6:12 pm
The lecture actually did have sort of a highlight: he demonstrated how their marketing division uses an extension of ArcGIS to locate their target domographic for advertising and dealer location. They analyze the type of info people have to fill out on the census, build something like 500 categories of people ‘types’, and associate these types with census tracts. The names for the categories were amusing, from the ‘Green Acres’ top demographic target for Harley, to the ‘Latte & Laptops’ San Franciscians.
Then the dude wrapped up his presentation with an explanation of the importance of his work; through this process of distilling the population down to a collection of digitzed categories, the junkmail (and other scatter-shot advertising) we all receive will be of greater relevance! Funny, I’m inclined to think junkmail is irrelevant by definition. Well, if it reduces the overall quantity of commercial noise and waste, at least it’s moving toward a worthwhile goal…