ESRI User Conference 2010: Conservation Community Focus

This past week, Conservation Biology Institute and Data Basin staff had the opportunity to attend the 2010 ESRI International Users Conference in San Diego California.  In recent years the conservation community participated in the vendor and partner exhibits but was only given sideline space that few attendees had a chance to visit.  This year was different: the Conservation Science and Climate Change Showcase was given generous central space in the main exhibit hall. 

The overall theme of the conference was community and community driven geography. Crowd sourcing has in the last decade taken on a powerful role in our society from entertainment to advancements in science. In the past, technology and tools to implement science stayed in the hands of the experts.  That is no longer true today. Citizens and scientists alike have at their disposal accurate gps devices and other mapping abilities as well as several ways to tell their stories through video, audio and self publishing methods like ebooks, blogs and micro blogging.  Today the scientific world is being enhanced by a wide spectrum of citizenry engagement.

It is with this realization that ESRI president Jack Dangermond chose the User Conference theme as Community with the by line “Geography – Opening the World to Everyone.
As we gave demos of Data Basin to dozen of interested visitors, it became apparent to us how much it truly  is a community mapping site.  Taking all the elements of ArcGIS online, conservation websites multi-media and adding in all the social tools, the site has become a place for the global community to connect, share and learn.  Many visitors to the booth started the demos with a fair amount of skepticism, not sure if the world really needed  another data portal.  Each one of them was surprised by both the usability and the extent of the community based foundations of Data Basin. 

In the keynote given by Richard Saul Wurman, the audience was shown the Johnny Cash Project, as an example of the power of crowd sourcing and community contribution.  In the project, the public is given tools to take one scene from the Johnny Cash video and create their own interpretation through drawings and symbols. One can then upload the new scene back where thousands of other scenes create the resulting video.  When one plays the song, one now sees an amazing new form of art take place, where not just a handful of artists display their genius, but thousands.  We hope that soon Data Basin will reflect a similar contribution through citizen science, professional contribution as well as the collaborations of both.

You can see photos of the conference on the Data Basin Flickr page and video on the YouTube Channel