Frank: You're listening to A Very Spatial Podcast, episode 742, July 24th, 2024.
Jesse: Hello and welcome to A Very Spatial Podcast.
I'm Jesse.
Sue: I'm Sue.
Barb: I'm
Barb.
Frank: And this is Frank.
Jesse: And this is our 19th anniversary of doing, or releasing,
I should say, the podcast.
Because of course we, we did the podcast a little bit before we released the podcast.
Sue: A little bit of practice, not much.
Jesse: Well, we recorded it and then the
Frank: practice was,
Sue: Yeah.
Frank: So the real plane building while flying.
Sue: So for 19 years, good golly,
Jesse: Miss Molly.
Sue: Yeah.
That's a lot.
Frank: I had you.
It wasn't just me.
It is.
Since of course, most of us are around classrooms a lot.
Our podcast continues to be older than a portion of our, our student body.
Sue: Yes.
It would be what a sophomore in college.
Jesse: It'd be a rising freshmen into sophomore in a couple of weeks.
Yeah.
Frank: The official terms now, by the way, our second year,
we've gone to one, two, three, four.
We've, we've moved beyond.
It's interesting.
It is now first year, second year, junior, senior, I guess, to get away
from the sophomore slump analogy.
I guess I don't really know why, but I just,
Sue: it's just a long word.
I don't know.
That's weird.
Anyway.
Frank: We are a second year college student or soon to be, or shouldn't be.
Sue: Yeah.
So one more year and it's 20 years.
We'll have to, we'll have to do something for 20 years.
Jesse: Maybe.
That's how it goes.
But this week we sit down with a person we haven't talked to in a long
time who for a little while there, we were talking to almost annually.
And that is Burns Sikowsky of.
Sue: So it's yeah, it's great to catch up
Jesse: on to the interview we are happy to be joined today by Bern
Szukalski of What's that company called?
The small one out in Redlands.
Bern: Ursi, I think is what it is.
Jesse: Thanks for joining us today.
And just to kind of remind everyone, you know, since it has been almost
a decade since we spoke with you and things are changing in
your, your, in your day to day.
What is it that you do?
Bern: You know, that's always been a good question.
And I've been as, as, as you both know, and actually I'm going
to correct you a little bit.
I think it's been over a decade.
I think the last time we spoke, as I recall, and you
can correct me if I'm wrong.
Quite often am these days was way back at I think in 2008 at at Berkeley,
there was a digital globe seminar.
And I remember I was part of the panel and spoke with Brian McClendon from the, the.
Google and Pat Hogan from NASA WorldWin, I believe, and, you
know, a bunch of other notables.
And I think we sat down briefly after that and had a chat.
I could be wrong, but it's been more than a decade, I think.
Is that the
Sue: Digital Earth Symposium?
Bern: Yes.
Sue: Yeah.
Yeah.
Bern: Yeah.
How has
Sue: it been that
Bern: long?
That was a long time ago.
So that was the heady days of ArcGIS Explorer Desktop for me,
which to this day is still I think one of my favorite products.
And I was so fortunate to have been involved in that.
And I still think kind of in its context for its day and for its time, it was
definitely innovative and groundbreaking in terms of where it fit into the,
you know, the, geo landscape and the technology landscape and in terms
of what it did and what it provided.
It was a great product.
I really enjoyed that.
But anyway, I digress.
So I think that was the last time we actually talked.
Jesse: So what are you doing nowadays?
Bern: So I'm doing exactly what I've been doing for a long time some years ago.
And this is a very long story that we really don't need to detail.
But you ESRI 38 years ago.
Actually April 7th, 1986.
And that was my arrival at Esri.
As I think I've told you in the past I'm actually a failed biologist.
So unlike everybody else on this discussion, and probably most people
listening I never got a degree, never got an education in geography
or GIS or anything even close.
I was a bio major, chemistry minor worked for a consulting company
on the East coast for a while.
Ended up with a job offer.
on the West Coast here to do research biology.
Basically, I was a research assistant doing osteoporosis and vitamin D research.
Long story short, after a few months, I realized two things very clearly.
One was that I just love California, love the West Coast.
And I think it was the geography that really captivated me.
And I remember my boss to be, he, he started, he, he took me
up on the Palm Springs tramway.
And we went up to the top of the tram, which was 7, 000, 7, 200 feet, I think.
And it's like, Oh my gosh, I've never been that high in the United States.
This is amazing.
And where I used to go skiing in Pennsylvania.
We went to the Pocono Mountains, which rose A magnificent
500 feet above sea level.
So it was quite the juxtaposition and it was perfect weather
here in Southern California.
Green valleys, snow capped mountains, absolutely amazing.
The next day he took me to the beach in La Jolla and I'm used to
like Atlantic City beaches, right?
200 yards worth of sand, everything flat, and the boardwalk.
And I was totally blown away.
I think the day after that he took me to Joshua Tree and I was sold.
So all right, I'm moving to California.
And still at that time I thought, eh, I'll, you know, be out here
for a year, maybe two, then I'm moving back to Pennsylvania.
But after a while, I realized, A, I'm not moving back to Pennsylvania.
And B, I really, really, really disliked basic research biology.
You know, the work was very tedious and I think in some ways I'm maybe ADHD and
need to do a gazillion things at once.
So here I was.
Total career meltdown.
What do I do?
I want to stay in California.
I had to think about, well, what is it that I really like?
What is it that I really would want to do?
And I've always, always, always had a fascination with maps.
And that fascination began eons ago.
I heard in one of your podcasts, you were talking about how, how How
the younger peeps these days don't really remember what a paper map
is like and how, how to use one.
Well, I remember going into the local sporting goods store and
buying the USGS quad sheets and we'd go out and hike around.
And, you know, I was always fascinated by how I could look at this map and
I could follow the contour lines.
And I knew kind of what was over the next hill.
So anyway, maps have always fascinated me.
When I did environmental work, I.
processed actually the company was kind of unique.
It was a bunch of folks that worked in petroleum geophysics.
And we processed data that was flown through aerial surveys at
the time to look for oil potential throughout the world, Costa Rica,
Alaska, North Slope, Philippines.
And I processed that data.
On a what was it was a data general mini computer.
So I got these big reels of tape sent to me and I had to process it.
And I, you know, I had to make graphs and, you know, would kind of show where
the alarm anomalies were along the flight lines, and then a bunch of PHD
geophysicists would stand around the table and look at what I printed out.
And they'd be smoking their pipes.
They'd be like,
Frank: yeah, oil, oil over here
Bern: kind of thing.
It was a really fun, but anyway, I loved working with computers.
I bought my first computer shortly thereafter, a TRS 80, trash 80, the
old you know, trash 80 and I started.
programming, visual basic programming.
I just love that.
So anyway, career meltdown, what do I like to do?
It's maps.
It would be great if I could do environmental work, if I could
use computers all the better and, but I don't know where to go.
Esri was about a hundred people at the time and where the cafe is
today that I'm looking at from my office was the Montessori school.
And one of the people I worked with in the research lab, his son
went to the Montessori school and he says, Hey, you should check out
that environmental mapping research.
I don't know, something company says my son had a tour of it.
They use computers and they do environmental stuff and they make maps.
And I thought, great.
And then, You know, I just happened to run into somebody
at the racket club I belong to.
And you know, I said, she, she just moved from the Northeast
to be a consultant at Esri.
And I said, Hey, I'll take you out to lunch.
If you can get me in the door, introduce me to some people.
So she, she did.
And, you know, that kind of started my journey.
I was at the right place at the right time.
Esri was hiring at the time for a big project called the rail garrison project,
where we had to automate the rail network for the U S and I just showed up at the
door and I said, I'm not quite sure what you guys do, but I'm really interested.
So long story short, I had the usual Esri interview wearing my finest polyester non
organic clothing at the time and a clip on tie sweating out on the back patio
being interviewed by a dozen people.
And lo and behold, I got a job offer and the rest is history, so
that's I've always sort of worked.
in kind of different areas.
You know, back then we didn't have titles, didn't really have positions.
Everybody's pulling oars on the ESRI boat.
And we just did things.
I became involved real quickly with a group called, we used to call
it the Benchmarks Team, now called the Applications Prototype Lab.
And my boss at the time, who's now semi retired, Hugh Keegan, the best best boss,
I should say, best manager I ever had.
My entire life, great guy, just had him over for a barbecue
the other, last weekend.
But anyway we just did everything.
And I, over the years, as, as we became a little more structured, I managed to
be able to craft a unique position for myself, kind of put it on Jack Spindle.
And I said, Jack, this is what I want to do.
Basically, Jack says, go do it.
And that's sort of been my kind of self made position.
It's a tech evangelist because that's what I did.
I evangelize Esri technology and help people be successful with it.
I have to complete that, that circle of life there, as it were, as I,
I totally know where the warts are and where the problems are.
I love interacting with users and not only helping them, but also
interacting Gaining understanding about where they're having issues.
And then I love taking that back to the development teams and working
to get those things ironed out.
And I think that's why I ended up being a product manager for so many years at Esri.
But anyway, it's a kind of a unique position that I kind of grew on my own.
I actually styled it after, guy Kawasaki, who was the
first tech evangelist at Apple.
And, you know, now it's a well established, well entrenched position.
So I went online, looked at all these job descriptions and requirements,
and I thought, Hey I, I do that.
Yeah, I do that.
I don't do that, but I probably should, but I just kind of
tailored this thing and made it so.
So that's what I continue to do.
Although recently I've sort of decided to downshift and
now do that part time at Esri.
Frank: So I'm curious, what are you evangelizing now?
What is your latest now that you're kind of downshifting?
What is, what is it that you're passionate in your heart?
Bern: You know, it's, it's still basically the same things I've
been doing for over a decade.
So I was lucky enough to be, I actually, I was part of the ArcView 2.
0 team.
And again, we're kind of taking a trip down memory lane and I'm really showing
my geezer qualities here, but ArcView 1.
0 was A very innovative product for its time and was built on
top of neuron data technology.
And I remember Jack described it once as limited, but interesting, which
meant that, hey, it had potential.
The team basically took off to Montague, Massachusetts and buried
themselves for a couple of years.
And they used to reside in this place called the book mill.
And the book mill was a great little bookstore and its motto was I think books
you don't need in a place you can't find.
And out of that little skunk works grew ArcView 2.
0, which was an absolutely amazing product.
It was, I think at the time it was maybe 1, 500.
It probably did 85 to 90 percent of what most people wanted to do.
A good friend of mine, Jim Tenbrink, he was involved in implementing Avenue,
which was this really great object oriented scripting language that.
Allowed developers to extend build add ins for ArcView.
And I sort of became the evangelist for Avenue at the time.
And that was, that was just a great experience.
And ArcView was just an amazing, amazing product.
Along the way, some of the key members of the team said, Hey, you know, Microsoft
has just come out with this thing called Visual Basic, and you can build
these little components that people can use to build apps in Visual Basic,
we should make a mapping component.
And I remember it was Jeff Jackson Matt McGrath and I, we
were all on the ArcView team.
And you know, Jeff was the lead programmer.
Matt was the, I guess the product engineer, solution engineer,
whatever for the product.
I got the short straw, so I got to be the product manager.
And we made a proposal to Jack and Clint and Scott Morehouse
at the time said, look, this is what we're we would like to do.
And we think that there's a place for this in the market.
We'd like to build mapping components for visual basic
developers from Microsoft platform.
So that began the saga of map objects, which was a very,
very, very fun, fun ride.
And then from there, I moved on to let's see, what was it after that arch IMS?
And after that was yeah, arc.
ArcGIS Explorer desktop.
And then that was sort of back in the fledgling days of internet mapping in
general, little known fact is that Mo, MapObjects, as we used to call it Mo IMS
was the first internet product from Esri.
It actually, Beat ArcView IMS, that was internet map server, beat
ArcView IMS by about three months.
It was like a big competition between the teams.
And you know, that was very transactional, right?
Send the request, you know, the app running in the backend does
something, makes map, sends you the map, actually little pieces
of the map, which got assembled.
And, you know, it was a very transactional thing, not very quick and not very
capable in terms of other capabilities.
Out of those limitations grew a need from some of our customers to do
something a little bit different.
So out of our professional services department at the time, I think we grew
something called geographic data server.
And that was our solution for customers where Mo IMS and Arcview didn't cut it
for them, just couldn't, couldn't do it.
Lack of performance, lack of capabilities.
And GDS, Geographic Data Server, actually spawned ArcIMS, which was released based
upon that, that internal GDS project.
And we released it, first version was 3.
0.
And I kind of moved on was product manager for that.
This was also the fledgling days of what became known as, well, now the
living Atlas actually the geography network kind of grew up out of that.
It was like, Hey, we've got these service capabilities, these abilities to.
You know, distribute maps over the internet.
Let's make a repository, the Geography Network, where people can store their
maps, their data for download, their register, their services, and then
they'll be able to use them and be able to take advantage of them without
having to do all this hunting around.
You have to remember that I grew up back in the days where when you
started a project, you downloaded the digital line graph from the USGS
and you had to process that right in ArcInfo or, you know, everything,
you that you needed had to be built, digitized, translated, all that stuff.
And this is well before there was a service based architecture available.
Anyway that kind of started off the geography network, which ended up
morphing into what we can think of as the living Atlas and also ArcGIS Online.
So little known fact was when ArcGIS Online was first introduced, it
didn't have a map mapping capability.
It was more like a deluxe geography network.
And then all of a sudden, I remember a meeting where it's like, Hey, you know,
we should make a little viewer for this.
I remember there's, we had Arc, Arc Explorer was kind of like a little
front end for that, that you could use to make maps really quickly.
And then remember there was one team that proposed a JavaScript map viewer
and another team said, Oh no, we're going to adopt Microsoft Silverlight.
And we're going to.
build ARC Explorer web is what it was called at the time.
And you know, it's kind of interesting.
JavaScript was pretty new and not that great at the time.
Silverlight was a little bit more advanced shall we say, and
also had Microsoft behind it.
But then of course, Microsoft backed away from it.
That was the end of that.
JavaScript is where it's at today and, and life goes on.
So at any rate, just to circle back to your question in
a long and roundabout way.
I've always been involved sort of in that kind of internet mapping space and
involved in the early days of ArcGIS online and LivingAtlas and things
like that, and currently my focus.
I focus pretty much on ArcGIS Online and also Living Atlas.
Rarely do I really plunge into the deep end of the pool with ArcGIS Pro anymore.
I appreciate your discussion.
I caught one of your podcasts where you're talking about, you know, the ArcMap
migration and, you know, how many people are still using ArcMap and, you know, what
does that mean and how technology has to.
Move forward and things like that.
I thought that was an interesting discussion that you had.
But yeah, so I'm still involved with very much the same products
and evangelizing has actually changed quite a bit over the years.
And I think COVID marked, um, a very dramatic change in,
in how we all work, right?
All of a sudden we're stuck inside our dens and it's like, okay, I'm not
traveling around going to conferences and speaking at these conferences.
I'm not doing workshops, visiting customers anymore.
I'm kind of sequestered now.
And I think that fundamentally changed the way that I worked and certainly
the way that Esri works, I think there's, and of course, everybody
else, education, everything, it fundamentally changed all that.
And I think in some ways, we're never going to go back to the way things
were, which is not necessarily a bad thing, because I think what we've done.
done is learn to adapt and learn to leverage where we are
in the best way as possible.
We now live in this, I think, a great marriage of virtual and,
you know, in person meetings.
I still come in the office like three days a week, sometimes four.
I don't spend near as much time as I used to here, but I, I do enjoy
mingling with people, meeting visitors.
I just hosted Some visitors from my Hino city, which is Redlands sister
city and in the greater Tokyo area.
And I had the opportunity to visit with them when I was keynoting a
conference over there many years ago.
But anyway, so I, I got to return the favor and, and give them
a little tour of campus here and take them around and stuff.
So that was really great.
So I still do all those kinds of things, but it's just, and maybe
a little bit different context.
And of course, now with other priorities in my life maybe
ahead of Esri priorities now.
Sue: So I was just thinking, listening, and of course we're
here celebrating 19 years of the podcast, who would have thought?
But it kind of, first of all, takes me back, right?
I, I made my entrée at ArcG or ArcView 3.
2, so that was my, my entrée, and more so with ArcObjects than MapObjects,
but did some of that, but what I'm curious about I think with, with
just so many things going on, right?
So many trends in geospatial, so many things that were happening.
My, I was thinking that at the time of the ArcGIS online, the ArcGIS
online with the viewer and everything.
And I can remember everybody kind of at the launch thing and, and talking
with David McGuire and others, right?
It was like, okay, this is interesting kind of as a side thing.
And then, you know, who would have thought, you know this
many years later, right?
What ArcGIS Online would become.
So what I'm curious about, if you think back, was there, is there anything, right,
that you were kind of surprised by how well it took off, whatever that might be,
or conversely something where you got, you were convinced this is going to be the
next thing and the GIS community is going to embrace it and it just didn't happen.
So I wonder if there was anything like that, that's, that stands out for you.
Bern: So You know, it's, I've seen a lot of products kind of come and go.
I think some went a little early, some probably shouldn't
have come in the first place.
We've, we've had some some fails, I guess.
But for the most part, Esri isn't so much cutting edge as we adopt and leverage the.
technology to expand GIS capabilities as that becomes apparent that
that's a wise thing to do.
So I think a lot of GIS users appreciate that safe spot.
You don't want to be on the cutting bleeding edge necessarily.
You want to be on the edge of innovation, but yet there's that little line
between where does innovation make sense and where is innovation risky?
And I think Esri's managed somehow, I think just because of being
maybe rooted in practicality.
And that's certainly driven by our users demands and, and what our users do.
I think you know, we haven't necessarily.
broken the glass.
We've sort of approached the glass.
But we've built some pretty interesting products, but they've all evolved.
I remember back in the days when I started evangelizing about web
GIS, when that was the big thing.
And I remember people were like stunned.
It was like, wow, this is where this come from.
I use arc map and, you know, used to use arc info.
What's web GIS.
And you want me to put my data in the cloud?
Like I don't get that, you know?
And it was like this.
revolutionary thing.
But actually when you look back to it, it wasn't revolutionary, it was evolutionary.
And I remember I did a little retrospective presentation for
a user group meeting in Texas.
And I actually dug up some of Jack's old slides, the old 35 millimeter
slides everywhere Jack went.
He used to carry around his little Carousel of slides.
And that's how he did his presentation.
I actually jotted down a couple of things here that I saw from that because I,
I thought it was so interesting, but you know, even back when Esri was just
beginning Jack's vision for the technology was very similar to what it is today.
And I can listen to what he just spoke about at the user
conference just last week.
And it actually echoes a lot of his early messages.
He always, you know, would talk about GIS becoming more pervasive
or GIS making it possible for, for anyone and everyone anywhere to
experience it and things like that.
So I think in some ways, there's always been that forward looking vision,
certainly from Jack and certainly from some of the key members of development
teams, that forward looking vision.
And what's happened is underneath all of that, the technology
is what has supported us.
And.
evolved the technology that Esri produces into what it is today.
The one thing I can say for sure though, is it used to be
quite a lot simpler, right?
You sat down in front of your Hazeltine terminal and you, at the arc prompt,
you typed a clean hashtag, hashtag, hashtag, you know, fuzzy tolerance, done.
And I think what's kind of happened is Esri used to be a software company.
I guess you could, you could say that we were actually one of the
very early software companies.
You know, we.
Esri was founded before Microsoft was, before Apple, before, you know, before the
internet was developed, before cell phone.
I mean, it's just amazing.
While we were, I think at one point in time, a software company and
we sold software products, I think what's fundamentally happened and
what has, been driven by technology and certainly our user needs.
I mean, GIS evolves with technologies and what our users expectations
are, what they want out of a system or the challenges that they face.
We now actually have a very large, very deep and very wide system.
And it used to be You know, you bought ArcInfo or ArcMap and
you use pretty much all of it.
Nowadays, what people do is they take the platform and they implement bits
and pieces of it to build the systems that they use to do their work.
So I think users today don't really experience.
software from Esri.
They don't really experience the entire platform.
They experience a system that they've crafted by pulling together bits and
pieces of that platform to create the solution that they need, right?
So maybe it's a parcel management system or utility outage system
or a forestry management system.
Those are all built on the platform, but they're assembled using You
know, different pieces, different capabilities, and that's, I
think, the way we use GIS setting.
It's quite different than the way things used to be.
Barb: So, one of the threads when I was hearing you go through your
personal history and the history of the technology isn't about the
technology, but it's something that I've noticed people respond to in terms
of geospatial, which is the creativity and adaptability that you bring.
And that that's that's part of it.
That's something that's that's underpinned and everything.
In there, you might not, you probably know this and not saying
anything new, but yes, right.
I also did the 1 of the 1st MOOCs outreach with massive education.
So, is that something that you, when you look on all the impact that you've
had, because I'm trying to even imagine all the people and what they've done.
Do you do you think about the, the impact on the society as a whole?
Bern: Well, let's just say I'm not that great or deep a thinker, I'm pretty,
remember I'm a failed biologist, right?
So, I kind of look at things from the ground up, so I've always had
an empathy, I guess one could say, for people that are trying to figure
out GIS, and inherently I think it's gotten a little more complicated.
But for larger organizations, those complications are perhaps a bit easier to
overcome than for smaller organizations.
And my, I don't know, I just have a soft spot in my heart for people that still
think enterprise is a car rental agency rather than ArcGIS Enterprise, which is
what most people implement these days.
So it's really interesting.
Like I've always, just because I think I had this love of maps that have
always been readily available to me.
You know, GIS is for GIS people.
And in fact, I think you could even say that today Esri technology
is for GIS organizations.
It's not necessarily for individuals.
And part of what makes me say that is I've had some interactions with some
very small nonprofits recently, and even some just geo interested people that
are currently using, you know, Google earth and KML and, you know, those
very simple little building blocks.
I think what happens with some.
People, and it's interesting to see or to hear more about how you might
deal with this as educators is when you buy into, shall we say, invest
in, when you capitalize on the ArcGIS platform, inherently, it also has
components of it That are not something you learn a whole lot about in school.
So one of the nonprofits I was working with, they were really
interested in story maps, right?
So they were captivated by the story maps.
Wow.
That's really cool.
We'd love to do it.
We'd love to make some maps.
And, you know, Jack sort of gave that to me as a little special.
So I've been kind of connecting with them and helping them along.
But all of a sudden, you know, here they end up with ArcGIS Online and a bunch
of members, and they have to figure out how to manage the organization.
They have to understand what a credit is, right?
And you know, there's all these people.
Parts of a modern GIS, which are not really GIS or spatially related at all.
It's an administrative role, which in an ArcGIS organization is as important
as many other roles are certainly.
And that's something I think people don't really quite understand.
And in fact, this one organization in particular,
that was their stumbling block.
It's like, Oh, wait a second.
You know, I have to, I have members and they have user types and roles.
And I, gosh, I have credits now when I do, you know, it's, it's
like, those are the things I think that catch people off guard.
Larger, you know, organizations don't really deal with that.
They get new ELA, they have a focus from an account manager.
They have focus from solution engineers, but it's always been really interesting
for me to have an opportunity and to meet at conferences and whatnot, the
smaller users that are just beginning to kind of lift and just beginning
to figure out like what they can do.
And you know, I struggle a lot with people that are still using Google Earth
and you know, it's like, there's a whole lot more you can do but just kind of
moving up the couple of steps to get to a place where they can leverage that
sometimes for many people is I don't know, just, just a little bit of a challenge.
Jesse: The number of PhDs that we deal with every day who we like, if you
just do this a little bit more, if you just look at GIS, as opposed to
telling your students to go do this over in Google maps, your students
would have such one easier time for doing their work and to have a thing
they can take out into the job market.
So it's just, ah, but that's, that's one of the things, right.
As part of the evangelist aspect.
is, you know, trying to bring those people into the, the geospace.
And a lot of them, of course, are coming because they've heard
of Esri and things like that.
But how do you, whenever you're interacting with some of these people
that you're meeting for the first time, how are you trying to bring
them a little bit deeper into that geospace, into the geospatial arena?
Bern: That's, that's a really good, good question.
But what I try to do, I just did a little virtual webcast for a group
of conservation folks that really have no GIS expertise at all.
So I tried to break it down into the little you know, little pieces
of how they can exceed succeed.
And I also will acknowledge let's, you know, take my Esri hat off here for
a while that for some organizations, depending on where you're at, you don't
need you don't need full blown GIS.
You just want to make some simple maps because maps, I mean, even today, maps
are the fundamental building blocks of geographic information systems.
And they, they, Captivate us now, especially with what you can do and
what you can add to them, pop ups and tables and all these really great things.
They are the fundamental building block of any geospatial activity for some
people that's KML and Google Earth.
And I am not going to fault people for doing that because it's simple.
It's free.
And a lot of the people I, I talked to are, are mostly
interested in the free part.
So all of a sudden when you have to get a subscription and, you know, all that
stuff, that they sort of glaze over.
One thing I am very fortunate to talk about is Esri has amazing grant programs.
And Steve Beckwith is an amazing gentleman who runs our conservation grant program.
And he's helped out a lot of users.
I've kind of steered in his direction.
that are just getting lifted and don't have a lot of funding.
And we have a great Esri conservation program, which
also lowers the bar for entry.
And you know, we've great tutorials, great educational materials.
So it does kind of lower the bar a bit, but still you're
buying into the ecosystem.
And Yeah, that's just part of what a modern day GIS is.
And it's not like people still are confused when I talk to them
about how ArcGIS Online works.
Oh, wait, it's not like I buy software and I install it.
And I think there's a lot of thinking like that, that, oh yeah, it's software.
I install it and I use it.
Yes and no, but you know, the benefits for kind of understanding it at a deeper level
and taking it a little bit further is that you reside in this amazing ecosystem.
That's not just full of fellow users, fellow ArcGIS online or enterprise
users, but also connects directly and makes it seamless to access all that
amazing content that's in Living Atlas.
And yeah, to, to me, Living Atlas is this one of the most, I think,
undersung parts of the entire platform, the entire ecosystem.
I used to do these tech sessions with Dean Kensok and Sean Breyer at the
UC, and it was just an intro session.
And we'd start off the session by saying, how many people.
Use living Atlas and maybe a third of the people in the
room would raise their hands.
Then the question would be how many people have used base maps?
Everybody raises their hand, right?
Well, if you're using a base map, that's actually from the living Atlas.
And that's what takes away the burden of you having to build that for yourself.
It's ready to use.
Ready to go tons of different flavors.
And on top of that, you've got all this wealth of, you know, live feeds.
You've got all the demographic data, you've got global climate information.
So I, I think that richness of the ecosystem is what is compelling for
people to learn more and perhaps take it to the next level, maybe some people,
all they really need to do is add a KML to Google earth and they're done.
That's fine.
But for those that understand what they might be missing or what The
potential is then it's like, okay, I'm ready to take it to the next level.
And that's when it becomes really interesting for me to try to help
them figure out how to do that.
Frank: So I'm going to push back ever so slightly.
Something you said earlier you're not like
Bern: pushback,
Frank: you're not just a failed biologist.
I think you're a wildly successful geographer.
It's a different way to think about it, right?
Bern: I think everybody's a geographer.
I mean, really, everybody is a geographer.
And, you know, geography, I remember when I had to choose what my major was
going to be in, in college, I thought, well, you know, I was really into music.
I played trombone, played piano, and I thought, I'm going to be a music major.
But then I realized that, okay, really, I want to play professionally.
And I, Just wasn't quite good enough to do that.
And I thought, yeah, there I am.
I'm going to be doing piano lessons for runny nose, you know, six year olds.
And that's not what I want to do for a living.
And then I thought, well, I had an amazing biology teacher in high school
and he got me so excited about it.
And I just thought, okay, bio major chemistry minor.
That's great.
That's it.
But I think just because we're all, everything happens somewhere.
And just because we are always somewhere, geography is built into
every experience that we have in life.
You know, even if you don't even think about it, right, you got
married somewhere, you went on vacation somewhere, that's geography.
You know, I'm looking at the trees out my window and it's a hot day.
Well, the reason these trees are either doing great or not doing
great is because of geography, right?
So it's, it's everywhere.
It's, it's totally pervasive and persistent.
And what's interesting has been that you know, Esri has been in a position
to be able to kind of take it to the next level by turning geography into
something more meaningful, which I think of as geographic understanding, right?
So a long time ago one of my colleagues here at work gave a little talk.
He talked to someone about some big decision they were going to make
and he said, well, are you sure this is going to solve your problems?
And he said that the CIO or whatever at the company said, well, I think so.
And the interesting thing was that I think GIS turns geography
into something more meaningful and that's a geographic understanding.
So it turns the, I think, into the I knows, or more
importantly, the I understand.
And once you apply GIS to get that understanding.
That's when things really happen, right?
You understand where the issues are, why the issues might be.
And now we're in a really amazing position where we can
even kind of push that forward.
You know, it used to be GIS captured the present, then, okay,
maybe a bit of the past and we can roll forward to the present.
But now we're able to kind of Push things out into the future.
And we have some, some of the live feeds and living Atlas now are predictive,
you know, what's the stream flow going to be like a week down the road,
thanks to USGS and things like that.
But that to me is really interesting because by being able to look
forward, I think we can look at.
look at where we are now and make some effective decisions about what
we might need to happen based on our understanding of what's going on and
what might be to mitigate whatever it is.
You know, we need to move whatever cornfields into the northern part of the
United States or develop hybrids that can withstand the higher temperatures.
Temperatures and, and, and deal with climate change.
And I remember working years ago with one of the, one of the vineyards that
was in the Willamette Valley, and they were already looking forward or
anticipating moving their vineyards further north because of climate change.
The climate change that would impact their growing.
So that ability to look forward, I think, is kind of key to GIS right now.
Sue: Well, I think that that leads me to a question then.
And over the many years, it's always been A question I kind of kind of do towards
the end is is the looking forward question And so I'm wondering as you kind of you
know I've had a chance to look back if if there's anything particularly that
you're you know Either working on now or that you see on the horizon that you're
especially excited about Because I know for example i've always been waiting for
the the vr to to make it You know, it's like the next year is going to be the
one where it's just gonna be the most awesome thing and along the way a lot
of amazing technologies and, and uses.
And, and, you know, I really like, I think that the evolution as you've
been talking about every year of not just building in technology, but what
does the technology do for us, right?
What does, what does GIS geospatial technology do for us?
Right.
That geographic understanding.
I think that's evolved to over the years.
So, so anyway, I'm wondering if there's anything that, that you kind of see
is really exciting, maybe you know, near at hand or further down the line.
Bern: You know, I wish I could say that I'm a visionary that could really
articulate that well, but again, I'll be the first to admit that I'm not,
but I do appreciate what you said there, Sue, because I, I, I didn't,
I think there was a podcast where maybe it was you mentioned that you're
still waiting for AR VR to really, you know, You know, to really happen.
Right.
What does it mean?
And even at the user conference, you know, people are always amazed at, at
the 3d things, like I think this year it was what it was Singapore, right?
So Singapore did these amazing things in 3d and we now have 3d
base maps and things like that.
And the one thing that I've experienced over all these years is that it's
pretty easy for someone to look at something that's been done in GIS and
say, wow, wow, that's really cool.
But then the.
Part that's always a challenge is, okay, that's the wow.
How do we make that happen?
And I think that's the burden that's placed upon GIS practitioners.
They take the wow factor that somebody in their organization just totally loved.
But it's up to them to kind of make it a reality.
And then there's probably another little question in there too, which is the why.
I find that I don't know, maybe, maybe this is going to be an unpopular,
I'm sure it'll be an unpopular statement, but I'll make it anyway.
I think a lot of GIS people make things harder than they need it to be.
And I think just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
And I remember years ago, I actually a friend of mine who worked for a
national park kind of asked me to.
come on up and volunteer.
He gave me a place to stay in the park for a while, and I
kind of worked on his database.
A professor, retired professor, had gone in and redone everything for the park.
Very elegant design you know, geodatabase, all that stuff.
He left, and all of a sudden, nobody could figure out what the pieces were.
I think what happens is that Part of what we have to do as GIS professionals
is to make sure that what we do is sustainable looking forward.
And in a larger organization, that's probably easier because you
should be grooming people along.
There should be documented workflows and you know, those kinds of things.
But all too often I see kind of things dry up and blow away for a
while just because Ah, man, there was a great team there, but they didn't
think about making it sustainable.
And then the next crew comes in and has to pick up the pieces and
try to figure out what's going on.
And that's, that's sort of been a shame, I think, for a lot of
organizations that that's happened.
Doesn't happen that often, thankfully, but it does happen.
So I think that's part of the role of a GIS professional.
A part of the role, as we mentioned earlier, is Administering an organization,
you're part of an organization and that means certain things and there's
certain skills and certain things that you have to understand and know about.
And yeah, I think part of it too is I, I've heard in your podcast, a lot
of it is about, you know, I remember Charlie Fitzpatrick used to say, you
gotta keep your knees bent, right?
You gotta be able to absorb the bumps in the ride and, and stuff
like that and go with the flow.
One of my favorite things that I used to say at the end of some of my keynotes was.
You know, I talk about, you know, imagining the possibilities, but
my final farewell would always be, don't just imagine the possibilities,
reimagine what's possible.
And I think that's something that GIS professionals have to do, you know, like
on a yearly basis, you know, just because you're doing things a certain way and
you have workflows that work doesn't mean that that's going to continue on forever.
Right?
So ArcMap goes away and you've got ArcPro.
All of a sudden we've got all these analysis capabilities in ArcGIS Online.
What does that mean for me as an organization with pro users?
And, you know, there's all these kinds of different things that
you need to pull into the picture.
So I think one of the obligations that we have as GIS professionals is that we need
to keep on thinking about what's possible.
And I think events like the local user group meetings being tapped into that I
think certainly listening to the great materials on your podcast and, and other
materials that are being published out there and even just looking and seeing
what people do and are presenting at the Ezra user conference is a great
way to sort of, you know, re imagine what you do and think about different
ways to do it, to keep moving forward.
Jesse: Okay.
I think, you know, whenever we first met it was at a transition time.
What 2.
0 was starting.
You know, everything was kind of shifting from, like you were saying with
Silverlight and those type of things, bringing down individual images to, you
know, our slippy maps that we have today.
You know, the short term excitement about Explorer and Globe and those
type of things that were, you know, early days pulling on some of these
active systems to today, you know, we just have this wealth, this explosion.
Whenever you look at just the toolbox from.
whenever we first talked in the mid 2000s to today, just the sheer number of tools
and the fact that, as you're saying, many of those are moving More and more into
the cloud, the fact that we now have web editors that we can take advantage of, you
know, it's just all of these things that have just changed the underlying idea of
what it means to be a GIS or geospatial technology professional, or just using
these things in your day to day life.
And we have.
So many more people entering the workforce who grew up on being able to
see story maps or, you know, pull up Google maps or Apple maps on their phone.
And they're just, they're used to it.
That was just something that, you know, we were happy whenever we had, I just forgot
the one from the 1990s map map quest.
Thank you.
You know, we were, we were excited about map class.
And then of course, once we got into GIS in the late nineties, you know, the access
to arc view, IMS and, and others, you know, Just this ability today to have more
of a conversation around maps because so many more people are used to them now,
you know, that I think is really exciting.
Bern: Maps are still amazing things.
And that, like I said, was what really got me excited.
I think what's.
been interesting is in terms of our ArcGIS world.
Certainly it's gotten easier to create really expressive and really compelling
maps and the trade craft bar to do that has certainly been lower, but
yet there's still things you need to think about and yeah, it's you know,
maps are the most powerful way that we have to communicate and collaborate
with other geo interested people.
And that to me, a map is the end product of what a GIS professional delivers.
And when I say an end product, I don't mean it's just the map.
It's the map in an app, right?
So you can interact with it and you can, you know, click on things and you might
be able to have some special tools to do some very interesting things with that.
So the, the notion of what a map is, has really.
Expanded, and it's gotten easier for anybody to experience them, but also it
has kind of lifted the requirements for a GIS person to figure out what that means.
I'm, I'm a Virgo and I pay, you know, attention to detail ad nauseam.
At least that's what people tell me is a characteristic of a Virgo.
I'm not really sure.
But when I look at a map, I look at everything.
I look at the pop up and I say, geez, they could have done this a little bit better.
This is just a list of attributes.
You know, that's as much a part of the information product as any
cartography in the map is as well.
And I think putting that into context of a great application is also something
that is a nuance that a lot of.
GIS professionals kind of miss or they miss the importance of because they
were involved in the deep root elements of the analysis that they had to do
or pulling together the data and, you know, doing all that heavy lifting
that you typically do in ArcGIS Pro to end up with that nice looking map.
But the map is how you communicate.
And these days it's all about communication.
Communicating what's important to you as an organization, communicating to educate
the public about what's happening in your city or what's happening on the planet.
You know, it's all about a map and that's the interface
to GIS and GIS practitioners.
We make the maps.
And I think there's lots of aspects of that that have gotten much more easier,
much more powerful that I don't know, sometimes they're just overlooked.
And I actually, I think I give some of the education people I work with a little
bit of a hard time because they'll show me this great thing that their student did.
And yeah, it's a good looking map.
Great.
But Oh, let me look at that pop up.
Oh, look, you got the object ID still in there.
Like, why didn't you get rid of that?
You know?
So these are like, I mean, that's just kind of me.
I kind of.
Pick and poke at the little, little details.
You guys have much bigger picture viewpoint to things than, than I do,
but I think that's all part of it.
I mean, the sum, the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts,
but the parts have to be there to make the whole as great as it, as it can be.
So there's lots of interesting aspects that come, that come together to
make, to make a great map or make a GIS department successful or make
make a meaningful exploration of.
Things that we need to do better our planet, better our world, or to
solve a, solve a task or problem.
Jesse: Don't get me started on pop ups.
Well, thank you for joining us after many, many years.
It's always been a great chance to, to sit and talk about some of the online
objects, but also, you know, just the general trends of, you know, how to
interact with, with our community.
You know, some, some of these things are, are great things that we've
had a chance to talk to you about.
So just wanted to thank you for joining us today and, you know,
talking about those things.
Bern: It's a privilege to be here.
Great seeing everybody again, and we'll look forward to the
next time our paths will cross.
Jesse: As always, if you'd like us to add your event to the podcast, send us
an email to podcast at very spacial.
com.
Sue: And if you'd like to reach us individually, I can be
reached at Sue at very spacial.
com.
I
Frank: can be
Barb: reached at Barb at very spacial.
com.
Frank: You can reach me at Frank at very spacial.
com and you can follow me on all the social medias
Jesse: I'm available at Kinda Spatial and probably you can find our
contact information at veryspatial.
com slash contacts.
But who knows?
As always,
Barb: we're the folks from Very Spatial.
Jesse: Thanks for listening.
Sue: And we'll see you in a couple weeks.