2007 August 2

This issue sponsored by

Professional Surveyor Magazine

Editor's Introduction
Greenprinting: A conversation with Breece Robertson, National GIS Director, The Trust for Public Land
Teaching GIS to Community Activists: A conversation with Gina Clemmer, President, New Urban Research
Letter to the editor

If, for some reason, you cannot read this document, please visit:
http://www.gismonitor.com/news/newsletter/archive/archives.php?issue=20070802

Editor's Introduction

Last week, I proposed the concept of public GIS centers. [Due to technical problems with our new mass e-mailing system, last week's issue went out late. If you have not yet read my proposal, I suggest that you click on the link above before reading further.] This week, I discussed related issues with two GIS professionals who endeavor to make the tools of their trade available to as many people as possible: Breece Robertson, National GIS Director for The Trust for Public Land, who helps communities develop and use GIS models to identify conservation priorities as a guide to planning and for the protection of parks and natural resources, and Gina Clemmer, the founder and president of New Urban Research, an organization that trains nearly 10,000 people a year to use ArcGIS to research and document community issues. Both are national projects that empower local governments and communities to gather, analyze, and display local data using GIS. In this issue, I also bring you one reaction to my proposal and 26 press releases.

— Matteo Luccio

Greenprinting: A conversation with Breece Robertson, National GIS Director, The Trust for Public Land

Fifteen years ago, after college and a couple of years of work as an exercise physiologist, Breece Robertson wanted to do something more related to conservation and sustainability. So, she earned a master's degree in geography and planning at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, then went to work nearby for the Yadkin-Pee Dee Lakes Project, which helped to create tourism as an economic development tool in a 15-county region. Next, she got a job at AllPoints GIS in Boulder, Colorado, teaching mostly to forest service and local government employees how to use ESRI software as well as CommunityViz — an application designed by the Orton Family Foundation to bring communities to consensus on land use planning. For a year, Robertson helped develop the training curriculum for CommunityViz and traveled around the country teaching it.

In 2001, Robertson accepted a position with The Trust for Public Land (TPL) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as its first full-time GIS specialist. Her first assignment was to assist Los Angeles County bring together GIS data and layers using CommunityViz and develop a greenprint — which is an interactive, community-based process that uses GIS models to identify conservation priorities as a guide to planning and for the protection of parks and natural resources. Since then, the greenprint concept has grown within TPL, which is now building a suite of services around it.

Teaching GIS to Community Activists: A conversation with Gina Clemmer, President, New Urban Research

Gina Clemmer first studied GIS in the early 1990s at the University of Iowa, as part of a masters' degree in urban planning with an emphasis on low income housing development. "At that time, GIS was an emerging tool in urban planning," she recalls. "The technology was not very user-friendly and it was extremely expensive to get the hardware and software, the plotters to prints maps, and so on." However, a very forward-thinking professor introduced GIS into the planning program.

"Immediately," she says, "there was a rift between the qualitative researchers and the quantitative researchers, for whom technology started to be the sub-text. I fell in the second camp and really believed that technology was a great tool to empower social activists. That was what brought me to urban planning: to make the world a better place." She discovered that she could use GIS to visualize changes in communities and to locate pockets of poverty and dilapidated housing stocks. "I got really jazzed up about that and thought that GIS was just the best tool to do that sort of thing."

Letter to the editor

A reader, who does not wish to be identified, had the following to say about my proposal for public GIS centers:

Public GIS centers? What a dumb idea! In case you hadn't noticed, 90 percent of the people in the world just don't get maps. Of the remaining 10 percent, 90 percent are unable, by nature or training, to apply analytical thinking to maps or spatial problems. Even people with knowledge of GIS — if they do not routinely apply their skills — will flail around on basic operations, much less perform a complex analysis efficiently. Joe Homeowner would be at a complete loss in the centers that you envision.

News Briefs

Please note: I have neither edited nor verified the content of these press releases.

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2007 August 2

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