5 New Year’s Resolution for GIS Users

As 2016 comes to a close, it’s time to start turning your attention to the upcoming New Year and reflect on what steps to you can take to improve your GIS skills and participate more in the geospatial community.

1. Learn Something Outside of Your Comfort Zone

If you have a habit to turning to the same GIS software over and over again, you should challenge yourself in 2017 to explore a wider range of mapping and software tools.

Always using proprietary GIS? Try using QGIS, a free and open source suite of GIS software.  As a popular alternative to commercial GIS packages, users of QGIS have developed plenty of resources and tutorials to help you learn this software.

On the flip side, if you have never used Esri’s ArcGIS software, the company offers a low cost personal use option for home based (i.e. noncommercial) use of its ArcGIS for Desktop Advanced along with options to include many of the more popular extensions for $100 per year.

These are just two of the more dominant GIS choices but the list of open source and commercial options is long.

2. Participate in Extended Learning

As a GIS professional, professional development is a lifelong practice.  Software, data options, and geospatial technologies are always advancing.  Keeping up with the plethora of tools can be daunting so participating in extended learning options is essential.  Fortunately, there are plenty of free learning options out there.  

A self paced QGIS course is available that offers five modules covering an introduction to QGIS, spatial analysis, remote sensing, and cartography.  On this site, take advantage of the free preview of Mastering QGIS which contains instructions on manipulating and visualizing data using QGIS.

Signing up for a GIS MOOC is a great way to participate in a more intensive GIS educational course.  There are a few educational and vendor options that offer periodic MOOCs.  Esri offers several MOOCs that are offered a couple times of year each.  MOOC List offers a catalog of upcoming GIS related MOOCs.

3. Participate in a Geospatial Conversation

Be a more active voice in the GIS community.  Each week, #gischat is held on Twitter to provide interested participants with a platform to discuss and share anything related to GIS.  

Started by Twitter user Emily (@wildlifegisgirl) a few years ago, the discussion session is held each Wednesday for an hour at 12 pm PST (1 pm MST, 2 pm CST, 3 pm EST, -800 GMT).  Participation is open to anyone using the #gistribe hashtag.  

More ideas on how to participate in the global GIS community can be found in the Networking in GIS: Peer-to-Peer Support in the GIS Community article.

4. Learn a New Online Mapping Tool

There is a cornucopia of free and easy to learn mapping tools you can experiment with.  These tools can come in handy for quick visualization tasks or for creating story maps.  Just a few options are:

Timeline.js and Storymap.js: Developed by Knight Lab (https://timeline.knightlab.com),  timeline.js is an open-source tools that allows users the ability to quickly embed content from images, Twitter, Flickr, Google Maps, YouTube, and Vine in order to create a time-based story line. Knight Lab’s StoryMap JS (https://storymap.knightlab.com) is a easy to use tool for digital story telling from a geographic view.

DH Press: This is an open-source WordPress plugin (http://dhpress.org) that provides users with the capability to easily visualize a variety of digitized humanities-related material, including historical maps, images, manuscripts, and multimedia content.  DH Press requires no prior programming experience.

Tableau Public: Tableau Public (https://public.tableau.com/en-us/s/) is the free version of a tool which librarians can use to create dynamic data visualizations quickly and embed them within a web page.  Users can create develop data story maps using a combination of interactive graphs, tables, and maps.

5. Become a Geospatial Humanitarian

Put your geospatial skills to good use by participating in a digital humanitarian project.  There are plenty of organizations that would welcome your involvement.

Zooniverse offers a host of crowdsourced projects including several mapping ones.  Mapping Change seeks citizen scientists to help create searchable, public atlas showing where animals, plants, and fungi have been found and collected.  

Data that is transcribed will become part of the Minnesota Biodiversity Atlas, the permanent digital record of the Bell Museum of Natural History’s collections.   The Old Weather Project is building a database of historical weather information extracted through crowdsourced efforts.

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) is a nonprofit that works to create provide free, detailed and up-to-date maps that is then supplied to government and humanitarian organizations working to provide economic development support and emergency response to regions in need around the world.