GISCorps: A volunteer community of GIS professionals.
   by David Litke, Emmor Nile
   Live captioning by Norma Miller.
   @whitecoatcapxg
   
   >> OK, I guess it's about time to go here, 3:17. Can you all hear me OK?
   >> OK, I'm David Litke, I'm a GIS professional and I'm on the core committee of GIS corps, I have a copresenter. He is actually our OpenStreetMap coordinator, a new position we just created because we're really excited about working with HOT and OpenStreetMap and we want to get our communities merged a little better if we can. So I'm really happy to be here at this great conference in the great Pacific northwest. I hope the mountain comes out. I haven't seen it yet. Has anybody seen it? So GISCorps, we are a volunteer community of GIS professionals, and since the theme of this conference is building community, the whole purpose of my talk is to introduce our community to your community so we can work together more. Before I start, can I get a raise of hands, how many people have heard of GISCorp? Wow, my job is done. How many people are GISCorps volunteers? We've got about four of us. That's also good. I'm glad to see that and I would encourage others of you to join if you're so moved to do so. The history of GISCorps it was an idea of our founder Shoreh Elhami, she wondered if there were many other people that would want to do that. Thankfully, the answer was yes. And we steadily have grown over the years until now we have 4200 volunteers in our database, available to help do work.
   And our volunteers are located all around the world. We're a cloud community, essentially. We don't really have a headquarters, we are a nonprofit registered in the US, however, so we do have a preponderance of volunteers in the US but they're everywhere and that's a real plus because if we're working in another country, we have somebody with local knowledge, that can be an asset.
   So what is GISCorps, we're actually under the auspices of another nonprofit, the urban and regional information system, which is a group of GPS professionals that manage data at the county, state level and it's mostly information management these days is GIS data and that's who we work to and our mission is to provide GIS services to needy communities worldwide.
   I've been using this word GIS professionals. So I want to define it. It's essentially people who make a career out of GIS. How many of those are in this room?
   >> Almost everybody. However, if you want to be an official GIS, URISA does have a certification program to become a certified GSIP. You have to fill out a long application summarizing your experience and knowledge, pass a test and if you pass it, you become a GISP. So I think it's one of the few GIS certification programs available. Our members have an average of seven years' professional experience. That average is brought down a little bit because we have a lot of students, a lot of university students, grad students who want to get plugged into our network early. But a lot of their professors are also members of GISCorps and there's a lot of people like myself, I'm actually a hydrologist who discovered early in my career that you can use GIS very effectively to manage hydrologic data. And that's one of our areas of expertise. If you want somebody to do a transportation network analysis, we can do it, if you want somebody to analyze multispectral imagery and coax out land use land cover, we can do that, too. A little bit about our model, we have a very simple organizational structure. There is 4200 volunteers and there's 8 members of a core committee. The core committee facilitates the missions. And the way that works is anybody -- well, we work with nonprofits. Agencies or NGOs. They can put in an application to get some work done on our website. They just fill out a form. The core committee analyzes the requests and if it meets our missions and goals, we make a job description, we figure out what kind of skills are needed. We then do a query of our volunteer database to see who knows how to do that kind of thing. The people that respond to our email blasts, we look at their resumes, do some interviews and select a volunteer to do the work. Then we just hook the volunteer up with the partner agency and off they go. We do monitor the progress to make sure things don't go off the rails and then we do some evaluation of the outcome after the project is done.
   So what have we done in our 13 years of existence? We've had 187 missions so far in 65 countries. Deploying almost 1,000 volunteers.
   38 of our missions were onset missions where the volunteer traveled to the place they were going to work. You know, a lot of people -- heh-heh, they hear about GISCorps and they say, oh, boy, it's a ticket to go to some exotic place and do some work. Unfortunately we're a volunteer mission, there's no paid salary and no budget for travel. So sometimes our partner agency sometimes provides travel expenses and a place to live when you get there, so that does happen, but we've only had 38 onset missions like that, where 88 volunteers were deployed. The bulk of our missions are remote, just done over the computer, working on the data in whatever country it is, and we've deployed almost 900 volunteers doing that. We are, by the way, thinking about becoming a clearinghouse for those kind of jobs overseas. We think it would be nice if somebody in the GIS field would have knowledge of who needs help overseas and so there are more overseas opportunities. 65 countries, we've worked in pretty much everywhere.
   Just to mention a few of our missions so you get a flavor of what they're like. A couple of onset missions first. We've gone to Kabul Afghanistan three or four times, I think. We actually helped develop a GIS degree program at Kabul university. Another onsite mission happened a couple of years ago with the Ebola epidemic where the WHO had some money to recruit for us to recruit five volunteers. One of them went to Geneva and worked after the the headquarters to coordinate GIS data. The other four went out to the countries, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Liberia and did whatever. It's never what you think it's going to be but they found worthwhile stuff to do. Here's an example. They did map health facilities. They're using OSM data as the basis of this graphic.
   Here's an example of a remote mission. We were asked to do this for the World Food Program primarily. They wanted us to map North Korea. I guess OSM is not bad for North Korea, but it's relative. And so they -- the World Food Program came across an old atlas of 400 hard coppy topo maps, essentially so we took those and geo referenced them and we extracted about 15 feature class, I believe, roads,villages, streams, tunnels, bridges, airports, all kinds of things. So we've now mapped North Korea and that is out there and available. It did take a while, though. We had 86 volunteers and it took five years. There is a video link there. This talk is I guess going to go on the web, the slides, so apartment a later date, you could click that link and see that video about that project.
   And one of our more recent missions with HOT. We just helped out on the Nepal earthquake. OK, I've got to go faster. We had 49 volunteers, put in about 479 hours on that one.
   One last remote mission I wanted to bring up is one we did in the US. We do do OSM work in the US occasionally. This was a thing that we did with the US geological survey. Jim McAndrew, who is heavily involved in OSM, constructed a clone of the potlach editor so we could do editing of point data for Colorado. We did about ten structure types in the pilot project, which included things like hospitals, schools, prisons, a bunch of other -- post offices, and that's all high-quality data. It went through about five iterations of quality control. So that's another candidate for possibly putting it into OpenStreetMap. I think Jim has some ideas about doing crowdsource wherever which point is looked at by it goes in. And we're really happy about crowdsource projects. They just started coming in in about 2008. We hadn't done any prior to that. But since then we do five, six, seven, eight a year and it gives our volunteers something to do. Prior to that they were sitting around waiting for a call, but now with crowdsource projects, pretty much everybody can get involved. So we hope to do as much as we can working with OSM, and lastly, the last part of the slide for my part of the talk before I turn it over to emmer is just a list of the HOT projects we've worked with already, with OSM, ten of them, so starting in 2011, so we're looking for to doing a lot more and emmer will tell you a little about where we see this going in the future, as far as maybe besides doing OSM mapping, when there's a disaster, also including some GIS analysis as part of the disaster response. So I'm going to turn it over to Emmor.
   >> OK, thank you, Dave. The bottom title will is the Sri Lanka floods. Many of you have heard of the flooding that happened in May in Sri Lanka. And actually the morning the floods broke out. One of my members I was conversing with on Skype and he said he had to go, he had to evacuate and because we were already in communication with him we were able to coordinate with HOT and jumped on that project and we actually made a fairly substantial contribution to that project. Mainly it was getting the road networks were done pretty well within OSM, but the buildings were not, and so we along with the other HOT contributors, digitized the building footprints as a surrogate for population and then we were asked if we could do some GIS analysis and so one of our volunteers did an overlay. The light cover there you can see are the flooded areas and then the colors show the density of population as a way to help very quickly give a feel for where are the needs for specific uses for geospatial analysis and then the recovery efforts for Sri Lanka. So we're fortunate that we had already started to be lining work up Sri Lanka.
   OpenStreetMap is extremely valuable, I'm permanently committed to it. It's simply data. It's not GIS, geographic information systems, but this would be an example of, with relatively low resolution imagery, using raster analysis you can come up with a good product.
   There are lots of ways in which volunteers within GISCorps could leverage help for you all in working on various projects so if you have a specific analysis need, then GISCorps would like to be there to provide that help, so you all can read, there's a lot of different things that GIS professionals could do that would help you out. And here's a -- here's something that I'll say, and being is not sacred, and we'll probably have Microsoft commandos storming the doors here, but look out. You know, often people look at imagery and this is imagery from in Oregon from not where from where I live and it looks beautiful and if you see that red triangle in the center there, it looks like it's kind of in the edge of the point. But and then also those tracks or those -- that trails that are there, are ones I digitized based on my GPS track. So I imported one meter resolution imagery and where that triangle is actually 20 meters off at the base of the cliff that it's supposed to be at the top of, and so the Lydar data is measured for every place on the image. But because of the topography, Bing was off. And also Bing is not sacred because you could see the edge of the trail and here's the digitized trail that I created. And I'll give you another example of here is one of the tracks that I took or a trace from GPS for a trail that I went on a hike on. And then overlay it on the topography from Lydar and that double line is the same exact trail. I walked up the trail and then came back down the trail. Well they're not in the same spot and just because you've got all these digits of resolution for a GPS, it's not sacred. It's not the actual location. Because there's error. And in fact, you can see right in here the profile of the trail is off from both of those, even though the GPX traces agree. So just because a somebody comes to you with a GPS track doesn't mean it's in the right location. It gives you a good idea and here's another example from a project in Africa. These are just the public downloaded GPS traces captured in JOSM, and what does this mean right here? I mean how are you going to use that to digitize from? It doesn't really mean anything, aside from somebody left a GPS on in a house or building or wherever they were, and as the satellites came and went in terms of the view, it -- it captured an erroneous location. So what you can get from this is that somebody stayed there and that you can generally see the traffic flow on that one side street and then on the main ones, but you know, GPS is not sacred. It's just a representation. And that's something I do day in and day out as a part of my regular GIS job and I would encourage you to, when you're using Bing or MapBox or any other data source, don't just blindly accept it because it looks like. The imagery could be off by quite a bit, and in that one example I had, 20 meters is quite a ways. It was due to topography, but don't just blindly accept it.
   OK, so then to get towards, you know, -- take advantage of GIS professionals that may be in your neighborhood, your community, and to do things like analysis and they also is provide data sources. I work for a public agency and almost every dataset that I have, I am free to give away to anybody that wants it. It's public sourced, public funds paid for it, and for the most part, I'm legally can share that, and so there's other agencies, as well, but they may not be sharing it unless they're asked, and so that would include specific data, but then also base maps and so those examples of the Lydar topography in JOSM is one place you can get some data resources and then -- and many of you raised your hands when you'd heard of GISCorps, but there's also people that you know, may have a passion for spatial information and you could recruit them for a mapathon or for even just general OSM contributions.
   And if you want to take a screenshot of that, there's our URL of GISCorps.org, and volunteerism is something that, you know, personally I -- all my adult life I've been volunteering at something, whether it was coaching soccer or helping with my kids' theater program or Boy Scouts or OSM I've been a volunteer and I don't see any reason why I'll change that for the rest of my life and I would encourage you to give back to your community, locally, nationally, and then on the third planet from the sun. Any questions?
   >> [inaudible]
   >> So the question was about GIS professional certification. If you go, if you do a search for GISP and URISA, then you'll get to the GIS certification institute and they list the requirements necessary to become a certified GIS professional, it's not just a matter of signing up. You have to certify that you have worked within the industry, have experience, and then have contributed to the community. For example, giving a talk at a conference, or doing volunteer projects. So do a search for GISP, and URISA and you'll get to the GIS certification institute.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  Do they have to have a certain number of years to get a -- [inaudible] SPHAO so the question has to do with the GISCorps in terms of numbers of years of experience. Go to the website and you sign up and testimony go through a list of questions asking about your experience and there are certain things that you are skilled at, then you need to emphasize that and put them in the checklist, but the search will run based on whatever qualifications you put in there. Know that you know you saw the numbers that there's with 4,000 and some volunteers and about a thousand volunteers have actually been worked on projects, so, you know, 25 percent or so have actually worked on a project, but I've never actually been deployed did a GIS Corp. project, but I do a lot of OSM volunteering and so that's how I view my qualifications or my involvement there, so there is no minimum requirement to sign up for GISP, but if you have some skills that you would like to volunteer, then sign up there. More questions?
   >> There. Is that what you wanted?
   >> You mentioned that there's a lot of public organizations or datasets that could be released to the public but they aren't really offering them.
   >> So the question is how do you get that public data out of a public agency, and I would say, just like the -- this is a community, the GIS is a community within various organizations -- various cities, and getting to know someone is probably the key. We're fortunate in the United States in that with our public records laws, that most public data is public. There's many countries where that's not true. There are organizations that have a funding stream based on releasing data. And that to me is problematic. it's worse when another agency that I funded as a taxpayer has to pay another agency, that I also paid my tax dollars for. That was kind of a philosophical answer, but a personal connection within in that community is probably the best way, is to find somebody that has the ability to share data. Question? No? Just stretching? OK. How we doing on time? One more question?
   >> All right. Oh, wait. Last question.
   AUDIENCE MEMBER:  You mentioned that visuals -- the imagery isn't sacred or GPS isn't sacred. So there anything that GIS [inaudible]
   >> So I -- he quoted me in saying that GPS not sacred, imagery is not sacred, but what can we do to make better ground truth? I compare data all the time, and so to look at a GPS trace on top of Bing and MapBox is a good start, but then when you're in in a local situation, taking your personal GPS and tracing a trail or a road, that -- then once you start to actually know the ground conditions and how the data was collected, then you can start to know how good the imagery is. Generally in, you know, the United States, the Bing is pretty good, because our DEMs are pretty good. This Sri Lanka project we worked on was pretty good. There was a pretty significant shift from MapBox and that caused some problems because the Bing image was more recent and it it was at higher resolution, it wasn't as fuzzy, I guess would be a way to say it but most of the digitized data had been against MapBox and I don't know what was true because I didn't have much personal experience on the ground and there wasn't much GPS data. But don't just blindly take someone's GPS data and say oh, it must be good because it came from someone's GPS data and it's 47.8999 degrees. The decimal places don't really buy you anything. I think we're closing up on time. I appreciate you being here.
   [applause]