GISCafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – URISA

By Ashley Hitt, GISP, URISA President 2022-2023

The geospatial community has always been well connected and supportive of one another and the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 brought drastic shifts to how we work, learn, and connect professionally. As in-person events have been coming back over the past couple years, the need for hybrid collaborations in many facets of our professional lives continues.

While some organizations and/or positions were already fully remote pre-pandemic, there are even more remote/work-from-home opportunities and hybrid arrangements than ever before for geospatial roles. We’ve learned how to work together with our teams to accomplish our goals and objectives, continuing to deliver geospatial excellence in our work while not working from the same office. Our geospatial infrastructure, hardware, and software integrations have significantly advanced out of the need the pandemic presented, and while some organizations have “gone back to the office” (although some never went home during the pandemic!), many discovered a variety of approaches and solutions that offered their geospatial staff flexibility while still meeting and exceeding work expectations.

This set up also impacted geospatial professional associations, such as URISA. In 2020, the annual URISA GIS-Pro Conference was almost fully planned to occur in Baltimore that fall, but over a period of just a few months, dedicated URISA staff and volunteers pivoted the conference entirely to a virtual format with changes that would allow for the connections and professional education attendees expect from URISA events. Additionally, the URISA GIS Leadership Academy, a 5-day leadership training directed towards geospatial professionals, was pivoted to a virtual offering that would still allow for facilitated discussions and attendee engagement in leadership exercises and scenarios. The virtual events were a success, and one major piece of feedback was these virtual events allowed for attendees who had not traditionally been able to attend in-person events pre-pandemic to be included.

Regardless of the reason(s) for not attending/participating in in-person events, the transition to virtual/hybrid events in addition to in-person offerings has been most welcomed. Geospatial professionals now have more opportunities than ever for connecting, pursuing professional education, and sharing their work and solutions in more formats. This is definitely a trend that will continue into this year, as organizations and professional associations continue to identify, plan, and execute ways to reach more and more people through remote work, online learning and workshops, and other virtual offerings, while also continuing to host in-person events to deepen the connections we’ve always had in the geospatial industry.

About Author

Ashley Hitt is the Vice President of GeoAnalytics at Connected Nation, a national leader in broadband expansion programs. She oversees operations, project execution, and strategic planning for the GeoAnalytics team and is responsible for developing strategies using GIS to provide data visualization solutions that impact policy, economic development, and the Digital Divide. She is a certified GISP and holds a bachelor of science in geography and a master of science in geoscience from Western Kentucky University. She is URISA President for 2022-23.

Category: GIS Industry Predictios

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 21st, 2023 at 12:40 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.