Author: bspauld

It has been a long time since I put GISDoctor.com into sleep mode. I haven’t posted anything here since 2014 and I have actually culled material from the site.

I did this for a couple reasons.  I was busy with life and I wasn’t all that excited about GIS. Things got a little stale for me. I was bored. I was having a little bit of a early-career crisis in my early 30s.

Professionally, my job has been excellent.  I am challenged with new problems everyday. But at the same time, the field of GIS wasn’t as awe inspiring for me as it was five or ten years ago (yes, I am old enough to say I have been doing this for over 10 years). So, I spent the past 18 months or so doing other stuff and not GIS blogging.

It was a great 18 months.

I’ve spent over a year being a content consumer.  I want to be a creator and contributor again.  I plan on posting with some relative frequency, tackling various technical and non-technical geo-topics – some short form and some long form.  I am not going to write exclusively about GIS, but rather the larger, more exciting geo-space.  There are so many amazing things happening right now across the geo-spectrum.  There are more people who consume maps, geospatial data and analysis, and location technology than ever before.  But, I see a big gap in the our space.  There are a relatively small number of people like me, the hardcore technical geo-nerd, but there countless casual geo-enthusiasts.  I hope to write about topics that the hardcore technical geo-nerds will appreciate and that casual geo-enthusiasts will understand and find interesting.   It’s probably a lofty goal, but I am up for the challenge.

It feels good to be back.

That’s probably an overstatement.

But…

The Boston geo-calendar is jammed packed with awesome stuff right now.  If you are in the area over the next few weeks, check out some of these upcoming events:

• The always active and always awesome AvidGeo Meetup group is hosting an event on Thursday, April 17th – Seven Habits of Effective Map Design with Mike Foster of graphicarto at the hack/reduce space in Cambridge.
• OpenStreetMap Boston will be hosting a OSM US Editathon on Saturday, April 26 at TelenavBoston.  This is the first event for this brand new Meetup group!
• The 37 Billion Miles Challenge is ongoing, and submissions are being taken through April 19th.  I can’t wait to see what is submitted. Open data goodness!
• The Northeast Arc Users Group will be holding it annual spring meeting on May 13th, at UMASS Amherst.  For more details visit the NEARC site.
• Even though the Hubway Data Challenge is closed, they recently released Hubway trip history data through the end of the 2013 season.  Space-time mapping, anyone?
• Also – Keep an eye out for the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University monthly newsletter.  They often have upcoming geo-events and talks listed, some of which are open to the wider community.

Now, I am sure I missed a few events.  If you know of an event that I missed tweet it out to @GISDoctor and I will make sure to add it to this list and retweet to my followers!

As with almost all blogs at some point in time the writer(s) eventually lose interest, become busy with other projects, or just fade into the digital sunset.

I am awfully close to meeting all three of these categories.

It’s time for something different.

When I started GISDoctor.com I never had any real expectations of what I would do with the site, and that shows with the topics I have written about over the past several years. For better or worse, I haven’t written much over the past year.  Between my job, renovating a multi-family home, and literally running a 1,000 miles I haven’t had the time, energy or desire to keep the site up-to-date.  Twitter has been great for keeping my ideas out in the social geo-sphere, unfortunately, I just haven’t had the inspiration or time to put many ideas or projects into this medium.

But, it’s not truly the end.  GISDoctor.com isn’t being turned off, but the focus is going to change.

I still have a lot of ideas I want to share with the community I love.  Even though I have a great passion for geo-tech I will avoid writing about it.  Over the past couple years I’ve been observing the great GIS-troll war.  No matter what project you are interested in, what technology you use, or how you use a given technology there is someone out there who will have no problem trashing you, without any sense of context or content.  We are all guilty of this.  Hell, I provided one of the most popular outlets for this very practice.  But for me, this has run its course and I am really tired of it.  Geo as grown by leaps and bounds over the past 10 years.  We should be working harder to do more as a community to solve problems and develop ideas, regardless of our personal “stack” choices.

So, where does this leave me and the site at this point in time?  Well, I will be cleaning up GISDoctor.com, turning off the comments (if you have anything to say, just twitter it), retiring some old code example pages (I still see some of my Google Maps examples still being used, which is neat), and updating some of the more actively viewed pages on the site. I also hope to change the feel of the site.  When I do post, it will be about the G(eography) in GIS. Tech trends come and go, but the geographic problems we are interested in solving, and desperately need to solve, are here to stay.

Thanks for all the clicks.

AvidGeo, Boston’s #1 social geo group, will  be meeting up this coming Thursday, July 18th, at 6:30 at Cambridge Brewing Company in Kendall Square (map).

Swing by for a beer (or water, or soda, or orange juice) with some friendly geo-nerds, talk shop, and pitch in ideas for fall AvidGeo events.  It should be a good time!

For more information check out AvidGeo’s on twitter or at Meetup.com