AGI GeoCommunity ’08 – some reflections

The AGI GeoCommunity ’08 is over – and it was a great conference. Building on the success of last year, the conference this year was packed with good papers and with 600 delegates. I found the papers from Joanna Cook, of Oxford Archaeology, about the use of Open Source GIS as the main set of products in a business environment, and from Nick Black, of CloudMade, on Crowd Sourced Geographical Information especially interesting.

What is especially good about the AGI in general, and the conference in particular, is that unlike other forums that cater for a narrow audience (say mainly neogeographers in Where 2.0, or academics in GISRUK), the AGI is a good forum where you can see vendors, commercial providers, veterans and new users all coming together to talk about different aspects of GI. Even if they disagree about various issues such as what is important, having the forum for the debate is what makes this conference so valuable Just look at the blogs of Ed, Adena, Joanna, Andy and Steven for such a debate to see that there are issues that people will argue about quite fiercely – which is a sign of a great conference.

I’m especially pleased with the success this year of bringing in people from the academic community who presented papers and attended the conference. This interaction is very significant as, through our teaching programmes, we are actually training the people who will join this crowd in the future, and we should keep an eye on the trends and needs of the sector.

For example, one of my conclusions from the conference is that the existing ‘business model’ of the M.Sc. in GIS programmes, which was, inherently, ‘we’ll train you in using [ArcGIS|Mapinfo|other package] so you can get a job’, is over. The industry is diverging, and the needs are changing. Being a GI professional is not about operating a GIS package.

We should now highlight the principles of manipulating geographical information, and, as Adena Schutzberg commented during the debate, train people how to ask the right questions, and to answer the most important ‘So what?’ question about the analyses that they are producing.

We should also encourage our students to participate in forums, like the AGI, so they continue to learn about their changing world.