 It's nice to see you all again, although I can't really see you. You're all sitting in the dark. I'm very pleased to welcome you to this, our third Trust Live presentation, which will focus how all of us in the preservation community can take advantage of existing and emerging technologies to facilitate our work. And I spoke about this just briefly yesterday. I see this as a really rich opportunity for our movement and one that we've been a little bit slow to embrace. But I think it has the potential to transform the work that we're doing, the way we advocate for properties and how we steward our cultural resources. But before I begin, I'm pleased to share with you a short message from Jack Dangermond, who's the president and founder of our sponsor of this conference track. His company is called Esri. And Jack and his wife, Laura, founded Esri in 1969 and have developed some really just amazingly powerful tools, including ArcGIS for desktop, which is both an online and mobile applications. And they've really become the industry standard for geomapping. I first had the opportunity to meet Jack when I worked at the Nature Conservancy, where I was for 18 years. And I'll say in that context, almost every meeting we had started with a map that showed the resources that we were trying to protect. And I was struck when I came to the National Trust that in the preservation movement, we don't have easy access to data about our cultural resources and especially on a landscape scale. Esri products are used by hundreds and thousands of planners, engineers, landscape architects, environmental advocates, and even some people in the preservation movement. But to not frequently enough, there isn't the cultural resource data layer that would help inform very good decisions that would help plan around the resources that we're trying to protect. So the National Trust and Esri have teamed up on an important demonstration project on the James River, which is one of our national treasures. The James River is America's largest river. It's home to the powerful Po-Hotten Confederacy centuries ago. And of course, it's the cradle of English settlement in the United States. And there, we're using GIS mapping to tell stories about the river and to encourage wise decision making and facilitate preservation efforts. And you're going to hear about that in a few minutes. After Jack's message, we'll hear from his colleague, David Gadsden, who will deliver the Trust Live address for this track. David leads Esri's GIS support for nonprofits, foundations, international organizations, and foreign service agencies. David joined Esri in 2002 and has worked to help organizations and people apply GIS solutions to all kinds of different problems, including humanitarian relief, environmental and conservation efforts, energy transmission, international development, and a host of others. The breadth of these issues really underscored for me how applicable this tool could be for preservation. And we'll hear from David in a minute, but first, let's hear from Jack. My name is Jack Dangevin, and I want to welcome you to this meeting. I appreciate the chance to spend just a couple minutes with you telling a little bit about my background. About 45 years ago, I did a startup. It was in 1969. I was fresh out of graduate school. And I had the idea that we would build a company or an organization of sorts. It started off as a nonprofit organization who would have as its focus the application of computational geography for various kinds of apps, I guess, conservation apps, land use planning apps, forestry apps, natural resource apps, land use planning, that sort of thing. And we were very slow in the beginning and then continued to grow. We became a software product company in the early 80s. Now we enjoy, I think, about 350,000 customers who use this, customer organizations who use these tools in all sorts of activities. When I look at your organization and more specifically who you personally are, it thrills me that some of you are beginning to use GIS in various ways. You clearly are about preservation of history, providing one of the major themes of geography context for how society understands things. Historical time, space, context is very enriching to all of us. Your work not only is about defining what matters, but also putting it in a context so that we can preserve what matters. And today there's lots of challenges, environmental challenges to history like climate change and we need to protect places that we really love, but also probably even more difficult the challenges of population growth and land use changes that threaten to make extinct some of the very societal treasures that we have from our history. So I appreciate your work and I sincerely think it's one of the most important endeavors that I encounter. GIS matters in this frame because it allows us to organize this information about place, about history, it allows us to communicate it in the form of maps, especially more recently story maps and my colleague David Gadson is going to show some of that later, being able to put historical places on interactive maps that talk to people and tell stories about our past. And it also provides us a frame layer of information that other people can use to analyze change. For example, will this proposed change affect something that we love and want to preserve? Another aspect of how GIS can participate is a new concept that's emerging, which is both an old concept and a new concept called geodesign. Of course it's been around for a long time using geography and science to do our land use planning. But with GIS, it allows us to use this in a whole new light, bring up web maps, sketch on them, do interactive planning, understand the consequences of it, and then move on and make decisions. And doing this on the web is pretty exciting. My colleague again, David, is going to talk a bit about this, but I'll simply let you know that we're having a big geodesign summit in Revence, California in January. I think it's January the 22nd, 23rd, 24th. And I'd like to invite those of you who are interested in this field to come. So anyway, thank you very much for just letting me introduce a bit about Esri. And good luck in your meeting. I'm a little jealous that I'm not up there with you. Thank you. I'm David Gadson, and I have the honor of working for Jack Dangerman and Esri. I want to thank you all for the opportunity to be here today. Particularly our thanks to Stephanie for her outreach to Jack earlier this year. I've had an honor at Esri to get to know special communities that are able to take advantage of our technologies to help make a difference in their work. And that's been a huge privilege. That includes international development organizations, nonprofits, a variety of groups that have very specialized needs for better understanding complex challenges. So I want to, again, thank Stephanie and this opportunity that we've had over the past year to begin to understand, and again, very, very at a preliminary level begin to understand your important work and how geography can apply. And so I want to thank you for the opportunity to spend just a little bit of time talking about these technologies, how these technologies are evolving and are learning over the past year to help highlight particular evolutions of these platforms in a way that we feel like can really make a difference in your work. So what is a GIS? A geographic information system is a system. It supports workflows for creating geographic information, managing that in a database that has a geographic reference system enabled within it. Once we have that data organized, then we can use it to produce a variety of outputs. That may include some analysis which compares layers against one another. It may include information products such as maps or reports. But that integration of geography provides really special capabilities and you'll see some examples of what I mean in just a moment. So our work with NTHP has been about how can these tools apply and the evolution of these tools apply to this work in preservation. And there's been a major evolution of GIS in geography over the past five years and that has a lot to do with the rise of cloud computing. And so traditionally, if you're familiar with the GIS system, you likely thought about a professional on a desktop computer somewhere, maybe in the back of the office and if you needed a map, you would need to go talk to that individual and describe what you needed and a product would come out and oftentimes the product wasn't quite right and you had to go back to that individual and iterate on getting the information product that you needed to make the decision. What's changed is that the technology isn't a software package any longer. It's been enabled through this cloud computing environment into a platform. That platform allows you not only to publish your own information but to reach out into this rich store of geographic knowledge that's being published by the geographic community. And that includes global organizations, state, federal, local organizations, universities, and research institutions. So the accessibility of open data is a new paradigm in geography and I feel like it has very strong potential for your work. Now that cloud framework also supports the development of very focused applications that can be made to help provide specific access to the information that's needed. So rather than relying solely on highly trained professionals and complex and often expensive software in order to participate in GIS, we're able to largely democratize the access of this knowledge and allow you to tailor specific engagements and interactions with that knowledge to do your work. So I want to show a quick overview of what this means. And one of the key benefits is the ability to organize and collaborate around specific collections of information. And so my colleague here is showing a demonstration of a sample site that we've put together for the trust. And this includes a grouping of geographic layers by theme and by geography. Now those groups can be private. You can individually manage information in this platform. You might form partnerships within or across different organizations and it's a means of having a focused place to access that important information and have a conversation about it. Now I've talked a little bit about those apps. There are a few in particular that I'd like to highlight. We've talked about collaboration and discovery, so a very quick example of that. You can also, you know, interconnect that cloud with other business systems that you're already using. So if you're using financial systems or tracking or logistical systems to look at your work, you can connect geography into those using this platform in a way that you can watch performance and change over time. Another example which we're extremely excited about is a concept called Story Maps. Our story map initiative began just a few years ago when we brought on a fellow named Alan Carroll and Alan had worked at the National Geographic for over 25 years as their head cartographer. And Alan's vision was that we could simplify the experience of interacting not only with GIS and geography, but multimedia to help tell a story. So I'd like to move forward and just show you one example of a demonstration story map focused on the James River. So really, I would feel unqualified to tell the historic detail of the James River as I've had this opportunity to work with the trust. It's obviously of incredible historical significance, not only the individual sites within the river area, but the connectivity and importance of that entire area for American history. So as many of you know, there's a challenge to that historic integrity that's based on a high transmission power line that's being planned across the James. So what you're seeing is not just GIS layers of where that transmission line is planned, but a variety of multimedia that's been brought together, images, documents, videos, and information graphics to help build out and tell the story in an integrated way. And so again, for those of you that are familiar with GIS, this is an example of what the cloud brings to us. So basically that printed map any longer or that PDF, it's interactive and it's connecting with other resources that we're pulling together to tell a story with geography helping enable that theme. So the other terrific advantage of the cloud is that everyone's important work over the past 40 years in geography and developing extremely important data sets are now open and available. There's been a broad adoption of sharing information. Now, obviously not everything is open, not everything is digitized, but there is so much content available that you can immediately access as opposed to having to make very deep investments in data management and unlocking data in order to get to a point that you can benefit from a geographic information system. So we think of this content as not only being available for mapping, but being available to enrich what we already know. And so the properties and resources that you're out there working to protect, there's a lot of information that's available in this geographic sort of knowledge base that I referenced earlier that you can actually bring into and apply to what you know already. So I work a lot with nonprofits and one of the examples we use to talk about this enrichment concept is, you know, who are your donors that are supporting your organization? Where do they live and what do you know about them? In many cases it's a record and a sense of some transactions in a spreadsheet. But what if I could, by knowing that address, could use that location to reach into that storehouse and learn more about that community, more about those neighborhoods, more about those trends, trends in demographics and preferences for radio stations and other ways to reach these individuals. So that's one concept around geoenrichment, actually adding records to that table by using geography as a connection into a much larger reference framework. So as this cloud geography platform has arisen, it's helped us sort of think of the use of the Esri Cloud as sort of a living atlas for the world. And so what you're seeing is a quick review of some of the themes that we've set up to organize, how you can discover and interact with this content. The themes are on demography, 3D designs for cities, global scale, landscape and climate change, real-time traffic feeds. Now, we're here talking about historic maps. I wanted to focus on one quick example, which is a partnership between Esri and the US Geological Survey. The USGS has been doing mapping for a very long time, and as you all know, landscapes are dynamically changing all of the time. And so maps have been updated, topographic maps have been updated many times over the years. So what if we could use those historic maps to sort of look back in time to say, you know, what did this area, you know, just outside of Los Angeles in the late 1800s, right? What was the national geographic view of that place, and use that as a comparison to see where we are today. And so this is one, just one example of one of those focused applications, right? And the USGS is a terrific organization. They've been making this data open for a long time, but it was a little bit difficult to find. And if you didn't know where to get to that FTP site, to get access to those maps, it was a little bit challenging, because the location is really had an exponential uptake in the interest in accessing these historic collections. Now, GIS in geography is more than just beautiful mapping and cartography. It really opens up the door for spatial analysis. And spatial analysis is the domain of comparing geographic layers to one another to look at trends and influence, and help reveal unforeseen possibilities across potentially large and complex datasets. There is a vast storehouse of tools and analytics that are available within any given GIS platform. And what I'd like to focus on today is three-dimensional visualization. And so, again, the world we live in is not 2D. Historically, a lot of the systems used for GIS have been, and so there's been a lot of advanced development work that's gone into helping visualize complex landscapes, not only in an artistic manner, but based on real sensor information. Now, when those models are done, you can provide access to them through the web, or you can even put on a set of goggles that would three-dimensionally immerse you into that model. And my colleagues that have helped me put this presentation together are here at the conference. If you'd like to stop by our booth at 149, you're welcome to put on those goggles and experience that. So, we'll move back to the James River and we'll take a tour through the impact of that transmission line that I mentioned earlier. So, we'll start out just on the edge of just on the edge of Jamestown Island, and we're looking to the east, you can see in the background of the transmission line. Now, as we move along the James River basin through the Colonial Parkway, we'll be able to keep that line in the background and get a sense of what the impact will be to a National Park Service resource that has a million visitors a year moving down that parkway. So, again, there was data available, but this is a different way to immerse yourself in that potential outcome based on that ongoing debate over the building out of that line. Now, from the model perspective, this isn't an artistic drawing. It's all based on real data, right? Engineering drawings about the line itself. The trees that you're seeing in this model were actually based on a sensor called LiDAR, which is flying over a landscape and collecting with a laser very high-resolution three-dimensional data. The buildings utilize a procedural 3D design methodology by which you establish some rules by which you establish the architectural sense of what you expect to be in that environment, and the software develops those buildings for you, so you're not painstakingly building out each one of them. So that greatly reduces the cost of being able to build high-resolution and defensible three-dimensional models. So, as you can see, the impact from this power line would really have a dramatic impact on this important historical landscape. As you know, the James River features one of the only water-based historical trails in the country. The Captain John Smith Chesapeake National Historic Trail, and as we zoom in here for our final view, traveling down that trail would take you directly underneath this line, and you can try to imagine how that might change that experience and how that might impact that very important national resource. So Jack talked a little bit about geodesign, and geodesign basically takes what we've talked about this morning. It brings it all forward, so we're not talking about open spatial data, we're not talking about just using that for collaboration or spatial analysis, but sort of pulling that through a consistent narrative of better designing together with the aid of geography. We're going to focus on one quick example that uses a technology called Geoplanner, and Geoplanner is, again, one of these focused applications that's designed to step through the geodesign workflow to get to a better informed outcome. So we're now in the city of Baltimore, and we're going to zoom in and take a look at a current urban development land use plan. And so we'll turn on historic properties and districts, and as we zoom in we'll get a sense of what's currently in that plan, what is the amount, what land use types are currently in the plan. Now, let's say that we're not only planning, but we're trying to understand the potential impact of climate change. So based on flood and major rain events we want to do design considering what the erosion potential might be. So what we can do in Geoplanner is actually build a model to predict for erosion. So we'll look at slope, we'll look at elevation, we'll look at the average rainfall, and we'll actually weight those GIS layers. This is one example of many layers that are possible in this type of a modeling activity. Now, we've created a surface of what the erosion impact is across Baltimore. Now, because of that open data we can do this for anywhere in the country, right, and soon anywhere in the world. So when we go now to look at a proposed land use plan, and we begin sketching against that backdrop of the model that we've just rendered, we're getting heads up information about the impact of that design. Now, this is one very quick example of a design concept and really a simple example around a model. But what if those contributing layers into your model were more based on human geography, demographics, socioeconomics, right, trends that would really influence not only the physical characteristics of where we're planning and doing our work, but the human dimension. And moving that forward, what if we could open up that design activity to a broader community with lightweight tools along this line that again bring that powerful technology forward and then allow us to forum by which we can compare different approaches to complex problems. You know, in my experience it seems that a lot of times conflicts over resources, a lot of time is spent trying to get on the same sheet of music and having a common basis for understanding and communication, and we feel pretty strongly that these tools can somehow apply. We've covered a lot in a very short amount of time. I want to thank you for your attention. You can learn more about all of this at esri.com. Story maps I feel are particularly relevant to your work. There's a beautiful site, story maps at esri.com and you can learn more from my colleagues at the booth here at spot 149. Thank you very much. David, thank you for that. It was beautiful and we've really enjoyed this collaboration on the James River. One of the things that has struck me about the tool that you just piloted for us is what a great convening tool it is and while individuals and organizations can use it for their own projects, it's also a platform for many various organizations to come together around a project like the James River. I was wondering if you could talk about that a little bit because I'm remembering our kickoff meeting that had 20 or more stakeholders from the Virginia State Historic Preservation Office to Preservation Virginia and others all of whom have an interest in this resource and could you talk a little bit about how organizations and coalitions are using this tool? I'd be happy to. I'd be happy to. Platform is a very popular phrase in technology right now. Really everything is being branded as a platform and I feel as though geography is the platform even to take a step back from as we technology right that geographic space is what binds us all whether we're excited about it or not right and so when you bring forward data into a geographic view it references everyone to that to that location. You know there are really countless examples you know sort of on the more operational side of things you have law enforcement, you have military, you have many theaters of operation with many moving parts where geography is an essential play in keeping organizations from running into each other in complex natural resource situations you know increasingly you have geography used extensively in the conservation field. You know that's not a new application of the technology but this quick access to the tools and data and the ability to comment against it and to post those comments in a way that others can consume is new and it's leading to some very interesting approaches and as Jack would say even some cultural change around the way that we communicate with one another and so it's really a thrill to be a part of and again focusing on that nonprofit community these things become very urgent and important when you know the world is facing challenges like eradicating polio or Ebola and the importance of having that common operational view of what's happening becomes very critical that's great so Joanna I want to ask you a question you're a member of this coalition working on the James River your organization the Chesapeake Conservancy uses GIS all the time and I'm wondering if you can describe how it has made your work more effective and how you see this tool that we're developing together being helpful in our fight against this high transmission power line sure absolutely so the Chesapeake Conservancy we got our start with the establishment of the Captain John Smith trail so we've always had these two parts of our mission historic and cultural and ecological side and we're always looking for that overlap of values and of course on the James River as you mentioned and David mentioned is a perfect example of where that overlap happens what these tools enable us to do a number of great things one is to really prioritize and overlap those values and see which lands come up as some of the highest overlap and then to show folks where that overlap exists the tools that David showed I think that was really powerful and I can't wait to show that so you really see the overall impact something like a power line would have in this view shed we developed a tool as a group to look at how many towers could be visible from each spot along the river and you sort of have this big swath of red where the most towers could be seen yellow where half the towers could be seen in green where a few could be seen and you looked at that bend in the river that David showed an image of just previously and almost all of it was covered in red and showing that using the data to show that was very powerful and people understanding the overall impact that something like this would have that's great so I want to pick up on data sure has this is all about mapping data and I wanted to ask Elizabeth much of the data that's important to our community rests in the hands of the state historic preservation offices and in addition to being the deputy ship boat in Maryland Elizabeth is also the chairman of the national conference on state historic preservation offices and I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit Elizabeth about the state of data gathering in state historic preservation offices and the move to digitization and where you see the state of affairs so this is an issue that the ship has been looking at for the past couple of years and we have a committee led by Mary Hopkins who's the Wyoming ship out to really survey ship those and talk about where your resources coming from what is the state of your data and we are these great data store houses you're absolutely right what we found was about 45% of the states have have resources that are digitized now these digitized resources you know a lot of the money that we have for surveys coming from the historic preservation fund from transportation enhancement funds about a handful of the states have data that is paper based but most of them have digitized data it's used largely for internal reviews of projects like those that are going on in James River I would say that only about 4% of the states however are accepting exclusively online digital submissions of data so what we're finding is a lot of our staff are doing that geocoding of data that we're getting in on their own and that's something we really would like to move away from and be able to accept digital data one of the issues of course is funding for that but it's an ongoing process we have about 6 million resources that we have survey data on so we have an incredible amount of data that we are challenged in making accessible to the public I would say the states are probably furthest ahead are would be Washington state, Florida and Colorado that are far in advance of other states in terms of having the resource data digitized and available to the public on a real time basis so I wanted to ask a follow up question are there challenges beyond funding that are impediments to sort of adopting this technology in this way? I think there are two things that we see one is the need to have some data core standards that we all states can embrace so that we share a baseline documentation requirement system and then secondly I think it would be this digital submission issue having a portal where we can accept data and store it and also then make it available back to the public so they can use this information to come up with things like the story maps and so forth we don't have a lot of resources to do the analysis so looking to other partners to use our data to do analysis is going to be an important part of what we can offer that's great I want to come back to this portal idea David and ask you to comment on that but beyond the state historic preservation offices and the great inventory work that you all have been doing for almost 50 years there are other ways to get data and I wanted to ask Mike Poe to talk a little bit about the work at the National Trust Preservation Green Lab which has been finding new sources of data that are available and Mike why don't you talk a little bit about where those data sources are how you find them and how the preservation green lab has been using GIS to tell the story that we're telling yeah we've been using GIS quite a lot here lately the older smaller better report that came out in May is really built all around GIS so our work really starts with property assessor data usually at the county level we can pull data on the year every building in the city was constructed the size of the building we take that on the one hand and we compare that to data from a variety of sources from the census so we can look at data on the age of residents in an area and we found that the age of residents is significantly lower where you have older buildings you see young people supporting older buildings throughout these cities across the country we took data from the Center for Economic Studies part of the census to look at the kinds of jobs the kinds of businesses we found greater concentrations of jobs in creative industries and small businesses and new businesses really starting in these areas some really cool data like the intensity of cell phone activity this is one that I think sometimes people get a little kind of creeped out about but it's all anonymized we're not the NSA or the National Trust but so we have this data that says basically where is their greatest intensity of cell phone activity at various parts of the city and surprise surprise there's greatest intensity of cell phone activity 10 o'clock on a Friday night where you have a mix of old and new buildings so the old buildings really do matter in a variety of ways we're doing all kinds of new stuff with treat canopy in historic areas we're doing data with the I mean my favorite finding from the whole study is I can go on all day but more than twice the rate of women and minority ownership of businesses in areas that have older smaller buildings and mixed vintage fabric this is something that Jane Jacobs one of my personal heroes wrote about 1961 and we've long kind of intuited that this is true now we have the data to back it up and it's pretty exciting Mike I think everybody here wants to know where you find this cell phone information so the cell phone data is actually there's a whole interesting back story that I could go into but we had a partner on the older smaller better project that actually had access to this data Art Place America and the data exists at various cities across the country actually mysteriously the source of the data does not answer the phone and does not respond to emails I don't know if the NSA is involved but something a little funny is happening but so we're fortunate to have the data to be able to analyze the data a little bit and we can even animate that data so anyway unfortunately I do believe the data is still out there from other sources it sometimes is quite costly but it is there so yeah it's really cool the new big brother that's great so Hannah I wanted you your students scan and you have taken the results from the older smaller better report and through the interactive and game designing program here at SCAD have further amplified this research and I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about your project and what you found I think most of what we've done is sort of very similar to what they're doing for the story maps of Jamestown River that was the original concept that we were moving towards what we started out with was just taking all these data sets I think there's about 45 of them yeah that's right that's a good play for people that are whether they're city planners, architects etc for them to use to make decisions and then as a class we looked at this and we said wow there's a lot more you can do with this to engage the public and that's where we started getting into the idea of story mapping very similar to what they're doing with James River and we took it a little bit step further as well and who knows if this will be a thing but it's something we explored as a way to engage a larger public to really get the word out there about historic preservation and we took the cell phone data actually and some other data sets that prove what areas of a city are popular to show this area there's a lot of activity this time of night and that shows that this place is a cool place to hang out it's not just a tourist stop and we thought what if we make this an app that people can use and from there they can explore the city and then within the app we would integrate little tidbits from PGL and their findings in the Older Smaller Better Report to kind of explore the ideas of historic preservation with new people who would never have even looked at the site to begin with but they're using it for their own needs to find interesting spots in a city and yet they get this whole new layer of information so it pulls them into a subject they might never explore before So Hannah is this an app that's available now? I wish but no at the moment it's a fully functional like prototyped concept that we've pulled together how it would work and exactly how it would display but until we get the app like fully developed and programmed and all the data hooked into that then it won't be functional but we have a prototype set up as it would work in Savannah so We should say that Hannah is going to be showing that off in a learning lab later this afternoon This is true Excellent and I think we probably have a couple thousand beta testers as soon as you're ready to release it we'll send it out to everybody who's here at the conference David I wanted to go back to this comment that Elizabeth made a few minutes ago about needing a portal and I've shared with you that I have this dream that in the not too distant future we would be able to take all this great inventory that the shippos have done and other data and combine it and put it in the hands of these planners and all these people who are using your product to make decisions every day about development, about demolition, etc. So how can how can GIS be it can it be the infrastructure and the architecture that would enable all these different data sources to sort of plug in and create those really rich data layers Yes Would you like to say anything more? This is your opportunity for an infomercial Sorry, just kidding but I do believe so but just to talk a little bit about portals Portals have the concept and term has evolved quite a lot in the past decade it used to be in the enterprise systems people would stand up a portal and it was sort of a single point of entry and a lot of portals failed for lack of marketing and outreach to let people know that the data were available US government was not a failure in the geospatial one stop there were mandated to publish all of their spatial data but again it was sort of a single point of entry and so if you didn't know where to go to look you were a bit challenged so in this new cloud paradigm it's really more of a federated architecture by which rather than one mother of all portals anyone can participate to publish their own content and make it available services and that open data can be brought together in a variety of collections and a variety of portals from different institutions and so it's not the same sort of enterprise track and deep investment that's needed to get to that point of integration you could perhaps argue that ArcGIS Online which is Esri's cloud is sort of that framework what we've done to try to encourage our large user community to embrace these cloud concepts is we've added a subscription to ArcGIS Online for each of our desktop users so if you're out there if anyone in your organization is using GIS you already have a lot of the capabilities that I showed where a slightly deeper investment is needed to then enable everyone in your organization to have that self service mapping capability and again that's an investment it's a fraction of the cost of software and expertise that it used to take to succeed with GIS and the fact is there are many users that would only need a very light focused application to be able to participate that's a great segue to what I wanted to talk about next so this looks, it's very sophisticated, it looks hard I've heard Mike Poe say that he trained himself to use GIS in a couple of hours so Mike I'm wondering if you can describe that experience I don't know about a couple of hours maybe I just made that part up but maybe you could talk a little bit about what that was like and then David I'd love for you to talk about what's the startup investment what's required to get started with a product like this so you know there is a little bit of a learning curve with GIS I think that your hunch is somewhat on but once you get past the idea and once you start really playing with this stuff it's not hard I taught myself through starts and stops over the course of a few months and then forgot how to do it and taught myself again and forgot how to do it and now I think I've really finally got it but what's really exciting is you can mash up this data people talk about mashups in music and art but you can mash up data but the older, smaller, better database for Seattle I met with the Office of Arts and Culture recently they have a cultural spaces database that's just, you know, it's points on a map and we can download that that data set from an open data portal you know, on whatever browser you want put that on top of this other layer and then immediately you can see that yeah we see more stable cultural spaces in areas that have older smaller buildings not to really always hammer that but yeah it's actually, you know once you get past the initial the initial hurdle and I don't know David, how you feel about that but I think then you really start to have a lot of fun with it you've really nailed it so I think the importance of learning GIS is to have something you're passionate about figuring out so historically the bar was quite high you had to take some training you had to work through manuals to get to that map that you were trying to build and then once you saw that map there was some momentum and excitement around continuing things really changed when I got started in GIS in the early 1990s everything was still a command line and if you didn't type the right code into the command line you never got to a map and so quickly came user interfaces and buttons to click on that advanced much further with simplifying workflows so 10 clicks became one or two and there's actually an entirely new desktop approach to mapping which we'll roll out later this year called ArcGIS Pro Arc based Hiç its build up its extension to don't waste a lot of quality and of course the tagline it's of high кity and it's a low profile information this is the cost of thru with the technology this is a high quality data aging technology for well under $2,000 a year. That includes the cloud computing capability and the ability to do story maps. If you're a nonprofit, that's $100 a year. And really, if you want to equip your organization with self-service mapping capabilities, let's say that you wanted to have five people organizing and publishing maps. That would be around $2,500 a year commercial and half of that through nonprofit. And everything that they publish that's public, there's no cost to any of the products or applications that come from that publishing. So hopefully that helps with that. That's great, and it's not a huge barrier, I think. But Joanna, I wanted to ask you, so there are great opportunities for partnership as we have going on at the James River. And there are lots of conservation organizations like yours that have GIS capability. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about the way you've been working with other organizations to share your GIS capabilities. Sure, yeah, absolutely. One thing that comes to mind is we've been working on translating, I don't do the technical part, so excuse me if I get the methods wrong a bit here, but taking 30 meter by 30 meter land use, land cover data, which is traditionally what's out there, what most folks are using to look for habitat classifications, historic and cultural landscapes, and we're breaking it down to a one meter by one meter scale. So you can really see on a parcel level, even smaller, where some of the best conservation actions need to happen, and to really enable you to be more effective and efficient with the resources you have. It's a process that is very technical. I have a very little bit of GIS training, and it's not something that I would feel comfortable doing. But what we wanna do is make that data available to everyone, the land trust, all the different conservation organizations working throughout. We focus in the Chesapeake, but other places as well, on web platforms, on portals, and those are things that ESRI can provide in different resources to allow folks to be able to use that data without having to have that GIS knowledge, but so you can still incorporate it into your prioritization. And it's really great to have that level of data when you're going to a funder, when you're going to lawmakers, to someone to really back up your case. So one of the things that I wanna ask you about in Elizabeth, I think you'll have a perspective on this too, is the privacy concerns and security of certain data, like archeological data, where we may not want that to be public. And can you talk about how that's treated, because that's obviously a real concern in our field? Sure, absolutely. So my background, I come from a natural resources bent, and so the type of data that I'm using that deals with that is kind of natural heritage data, endangered species data, and typically it's a rather onerous process to get at that data. I know it's very similar to archeological data, but it's so important to be able to understand where those resources are, so you can look for that overlap, so you can make your case and get the funding. And just to be the most effective with your resources, there are always ways, I think, to scale up that data or scale down, so that you may not see exactly where a resource is located on a property or an area, but that so you can, through different web interfaces, kind of run a query and say, I'm looking in this particular vicinity at certain properties, is there something here I need to pay attention to, and it can pop back up and say yes, there are some resources there that you should be aware of, and if you're interested to take into account, it doesn't have to show you exactly where it's located, so you remove some of that problem. So if you're a decision maker, does it give you information about where you can go to get more information if you need to get that more granular data layer? I don't think there is a database that's out there, especially for historic and cultural resources that kind of tells you, if you're a nonprofit looking around, who to go to exactly. Elizabeth can probably talk better to that. Right, well so as Joanna alluded to, there's sensitivity to archeological resources, be they terrestrial or maritime, and so because of the concern about looting, and there are also privacy issues connected to standing structures in some states, and typically the way that the SHPO's handle it is if you have demonstrated professional archeological qualifications, you go through a certification process and then you have access to those data layers. For the general public, there is still often generalized areas identified as being of archeological interest and concern, but that are general enough so that we wouldn't encourage or polluting and damage to archeological sites. But I think what we don't wanna talk about funding, I think one thing I would like to say is that while the entry to using GIS products as re-products may be very low, one of the things we've found in working with our SHPO's is the cost is averaged about $200,000 a year to manage their GIS data. And one of the ways states address that outside of using historic preservation fund monies or other monies is revenue generated by subscriptions to that data, which I know is not along the lines of the open data that is the movement of the future, and I think where we'd like to be. But in order to get there, we do have to find a way to allow SHPO's or other curators of cultural resource information to become self-sufficient or find ways to pay for keeping that data up to date. So when we talk about public access to data, even if it's protected to a certain extent when we have sensitive resources, there are some barriers to public access that are in place currently because of the need for self-sufficiency of these data sets and keeping them up to date. If I could maybe just add to that for just a moment. In working a lot with Native American communities, obviously there's so much sensitive information that they're managing and a long history of misuse when information has been shared. One of the critical things that we've learned and the tribes are adopting, however, is that those data can't remain firewalled off from the rest of the decision-making in the tribal government. That there must be, and there are technically ways to have transactions against those data in a way that you can make good decisions. And so I think there are opportunities for improving that service delivery, even if there is a cost recovery model. It's not something that we advocate generally. Our president has taken a pretty strong stance on open data, but we understand that there are costs to managing these systems. But to the extent that you can support transactions with organizations that are looking at development investments and other things and even charge for those transactions while not revealing all of the data, right? I think there are ways to improve the quality of service and the revenue while keeping things safe. David talked about the democratization of this data. And I think it's important to say that a lot of us is open, free, especially at the city level. I think cities across the country are seeing this as a way to distinguish themselves from their competitors to sort of show off how open they can be. And so New York City just released their Pluto data set which is all the building information across the entire city. Now you can download that whereas before it cost, I think a couple hundred, couple thousand dollars. It was a pretty significant cost if you just want to play with the data basically. And one thing I think that's important to say in all of this, we're talking about platforms and workflows and servers and databases. It sounds really complicated. It sounds really hard. But if you can use a web browser, you can find the data. You can find free ways to look at the data on a map. I don't think we need to talk about workflows and servers and all this stuff because that sounds crazy. That sounds like something maybe some of you out there feel like you have no idea what we're talking about. It's actually, you know, if you have Firefox, you have Chrome, you have Internet Explorer, you could do a lot of this. You could do it now. Get to some of it on your phone. Good to see you. That's a great segue and I wanted to ask Hannah. So we, to Mike's point, we're talking about two audiences here who are decision makers, but sort of everybody else that we want to engage in the conversation about cultural resources, which is the point of the James River project. There will be a section 106 consultation that our coalition is supporting and we want to use this technology to bring the public into that conversation in an informed way so that they can really see the impact of this particular threat to a really important cultural resource. But Hannah, I wanted to ask you at the university level, how important do you think using tools like this to sort of bridge the divide? We spoke yesterday about millennials, this new generation that cares a lot about historic resources. Is this a good way to communicate with people that are your age? Absolutely. I would say mostly because we're at an age right now where quantifying your life is a big deal. People go out there and they use fitness tools and stuff to track there every day. Like I have an app on my phone that just every day tracks how many steps I go just because it's in my pocket. You know, and it's something simple that I was like, oh, this is silly, but the minute I start using it, I'm like, wow, this is really cool. And so people are getting more and more used to reading data and being interested in it on a regular everyday scale. So these kind of maps are a good way to show that in a pleasing way. It's not a bunch of numbers on a sheet. It's a way that they can see it and interact with it, like with the story maps and then leading into more complicated data. So it's a matter of people are more comfortable with that now. So this is the perfect time to start introducing it to a public audience. And we're also moving, I mean, there are other kinds of decision makers. So in our partnership for Builder News Effort at the Preservation Green Lab, my colleague Jim Lindberg and I have just worked in Baltimore, actually with Elizabeth, which worked in Philadelphia, and we've produced an opportunity score metric that basically shows where you have older smaller buildings and where there are signs of really healthy activity, but maybe these areas that aren't booming. And so thinking about a developer audience as a decision maker and how can developers make smarter decisions that take, that capitalize on older smaller buildings as a great asset to communities for small businesses, et cetera. So yeah, we're really excited about the possibilities there as well. That's great. I'm gonna ask each of you, we only have five minutes left, to share a story or a reveal that you've had from using GIS and insight or an outcome that you've been able to drive in a policy or public arena. And I'm gonna give you, I didn't tell you I was gonna ask you this question. So I'm gonna give you a second to think about it and tell you a story that builds on the point that Elizabeth made just a few minutes ago about funding, which I think is a really important one. And it builds, Mike, on what you just said. There are opportunities to sell this information. I have to say the light bulb sort of went off over my head in the cultural resource context. The National Trust was engaged in an advocacy fight against a big box store a few years ago, which shall remain nameless. And where we were victorious. And we went to said big box store to say, we hate to keep doing this. We don't wanna keep having this conversation, these legal battles, it's costly for both of us. Let's see if we can figure out a way to get ahead of these decisions and ward off this controversy. And they said, we had no way of knowing that this place where we were gonna build this superstore was a national register eligible property. Where would we go to find that information? And that was sort of the start of this dream for me that we make it easy and they would be willing to pay for it because it ended up costing them a couple million dollars to back out of that decision. And so we need to get this information. I think there's just an imperative to get this information in the hands of people who wanna do the right thing, but they don't have the information to do the right thing. So there's an example where we didn't quite have the, what we needed to effect a good outcome in a timely way, but I'd love to hear from all of you on instances that you've had where it really has made a difference. And Joanna, do you have one? Absolutely, yeah. And I was just nodding my head in approval there. That's something that we've been talking about a lot in the large landscape community in a group we have called the Chesapeake Conservation Partnership, how to get ahead of some of these mitigations. So you don't have to do mitigation. You don't have to go into section 106. And the transmission corridors is something that's gonna be popping up again and again as we saw in the lower regime. So I think if you can share that data and make it accessible, hopefully we can get ahead of some of these processes. One another example that comes to mind is how this data is able to enhance collaboration. We worked on a dam re-licensing process in the lower Susquehanna and we had all the land conservation players together which everyone has their pet projects. Sometimes it's a little bit competitive looking for funding and wanting to get your lands protected. And we were coming together to talk about a mitigation package that may happen as part of this re-licensing process. And instead of having every organization put forward their priorities and it's kind of a disjointed effort and the company, the power company, it's unclear what the priority is to them. We brought them together using what we called a conservation opportunities analyst or we call it the Susquehanna slider internally. It's a little bit easier to say, but it's basically a user tool where you can go in and say which values are most important to you. So you can take a look at the landscape and say historic value is 100% when I really am concerned about proximity to protected lands, 50%, ecological 100%, that sort of thing. And then it pops back a map for you showing which lands are your highest priorities. We use that with this group of 14 conservation organizations to come up with a joint set of priorities. So instead of all of us submitting individual asks, we came together and we had 14 or more organizations in support of the same set of lands for mitigation package and it's much stronger in the end that way. That's great, I love it. Who has a story, Mike? Do you have a reveal? I think I have so many reveals. Actually, before I go into it, so many reveals. So Jim Biltner said, you know, one of the problems, I don't know if Jim's out there, but is a lack of data regarding historic preservation? He and I need to have a conversation because I have data coming out my ears about preservation. I think we're really making some strong arguments now. A couple of quick ones. So I think I was sort of delighted and surprised to see the extent to which maps of percent of the population that are millennials in different areas of the city aligns really nicely with maps of older smaller buildings and high character score areas. So millennials seem to really be flocking to these areas. You read about that in the New York Times and other newspapers and other major media sources, but the data to see it on a map is kind of exciting and it was unexpected for me. Another quick one. So jobs and businesses. Part of the reason we did this older smaller better study was some economists out there who have said recently that preservationists are constraining the supply of space and making the city less affordable. So we actually did all this analysis that showed actually on a per square foot basis, the older smaller fabric has more jobs per square foot than the office towers in the new large buildings. So just building big is not gonna get us out of these problems. That's a good one. Try this. He's topped that Elizabeth, okay. But I'll say two things. One where we've had a success and wanna hope for the future and the success is using LiDAR data in Maryland to look at sea level rise. And so where we have knowledge about cultural resources currently, where we have not done surveys. So we really prioritize those areas and think proactively about impacts to archeological resources in particular as well as standing structures when we're looking at the future changes in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. So that's a great use that we've had. I think the hope for the future is looking at the great work that Mike in the preservation Green Lab has done in Baltimore City and thinking about how the reinvestment fund is coming up with these market typologies that are being used to help the city housing agency make decisions about demolition will take place and knowing that they're working in other cities as well. If only we could layer on top of that market data that's looking backwards, what we know from the work that you're doing about where potential future markets are, where historic districts are that bring with them wonderful financial assistance tools like the rehabilitation tax credit and other. So that demolition decisions that are being made are being made with an eye towards the future in terms of where we have an opportunity to use preservation tools to make a difference. So that's certainly something that I hope for the future as well as just making that argument to our local and congressional elected officials about the value of the historic preservation fund and the work that we're doing generally. We can do that by the way. That's a great one, thank you. Hannah, do you have one? I do actually. Back I think a month or two ago I was speaking with a man that invests in different restaurants and buildings back in my hometown in Charlotte and there's a restaurant there that's very successful. It's open 24 hours a day. It's a little French bakery. But the reason why it's so successful is because it has the perfect balance of being in historic district and getting the right culture there. So there they have the millennials but then they have the business people that are a couple miles away that come for lunch. Then you have the people coming at like two a.m. after a show, stuff like that. And they need data to find out where these locations are. Historic district and the right cultural mixture. And even though the website for PGL is not live yet, it has just that amount of data that he needs. And he's like, oh, I wish I knew where to get this. And I said, it's out there. Like the data is there and it's all in one place because they were going and doing interviews door to door in neighborhoods trying to find a place to put a new restaurant. And I was like, it's not that hard and it's out there and it can be accessed. So, you know, there are people on a lower scale that are just everyday investors in random businesses and restaurants that are looking for this as well. But he thinks making chocolate croissants aren't that hard either, right? So it's all about where your perspective, yeah, right. So David, we'll give you the last one. It doesn't have to be historic related. You do great work all around the world. Thank you, thank you. It's difficult to choose, right? I mean, this institution that Jack's built over the past 45 years is such tremendous reach that, you know, every year we have a user conference in San Diego that draws more than 14,000 GIS professionals and the stories are just mind boggling and impact across so many different sectors. So it's difficult to pick. I would highlight the work being done to eradicate polio. That was our keynote presentation at last year's conference and it's a collaboration by WHO, Gates Foundation Global Polio eradication initiative UNICEF. And really the role of geography in helping aid in decision making around polio is in my opinion one of the greatest geography stories ever told. But you're welcome to watch that video. The personal story that has re-inspired me, I've been at the GIS for all over 20 years, was an experience with my daughter who was six years old at the time. And as you can see, Esri has, you know, potentially perceived as complex and difficult to communicate, you know, it's not easy to put in a few words kind of what we're trying to bring to the world of technology and geography. But right when our GIS online had come out, we were planning a trip to Washington DC where my daughters were born. And Sophia, as a six year old, you know, I wanted to sort of show her some maps and she was able to create an account and begin building your own maps about the zoo and the museums and the places that we were going. We saved and shared those maps with our family and it was just this awesome, awesome experience of sort of the potential of these next generations. I would comment that Jack has just made a commitment with President Obama through the ConnectEd initiative to donate our GIS online to every K through 12 school in the country. So that's both a challenge and an opportunity and we would love to form partnerships across the preservation community to help bring geography into preservation in schools. That's great, thank you. And will you help me thank our panelists, please? All right, if you feel humbled like I did, that David's six year old daughter can use GIS. You can learn more about this at our learning lab, this afternoon and I want to reiterate what Mike said earlier. Mike and Hannah are doing a session on big data and I think I'm going to go, I want to learn more about this and what he knows about me that I'm not sure that I want him to know. And I'd also like to invite you to look at all the story maps that are posted on preservation nation today or our website and take a look at the National Trust featured content on our Arc GIS online site to see how we're incorporating some of this technology into our work. So enjoy your lunch break. We'll see you across the river at the Technology Center. And please, if you have some time this afternoon, check out our film studio and take in a preservation film. Thank you all.