 I'd like you to meet an interesting Penn Stater. Stephen Ansari is co-founder and principal of Blue Raster, the company that you heard about in the video prelude to this case study. This story is about how Stephen and his partner built a successful business in WebGIS. It's also about what you can do to create opportunities for fulfillment in your own career. I met Stephen in 1997, when he was an undergraduate student in a course I taught at Penn State. In fact, that course called Mapping Our Changing World was an early on-campus version of the online course you are taking now. In those early days of the Web, I built HTML files to illustrate and share my lectures and assign students to code HTML too. Stephen came to Penn State from Downing Town High in southeastern Pennsylvania to study Earth science and mapping. He was already into Web programming by the time he enrolled in my class. Stephen had been coding since age eight when his family bought an Apple IIe and he found a book on basic programming. Later, he upgraded to a Tandy 1000sx, which he says opened up a whole world of programming simple applications and user interfaces. He says he loved the immediate gratification of building things with code. It was like engineering, but without the need for raw materials. For a time, coding remained a hobby for Stephen. His academic interests centered on Earth science and mapping. Then in 1995, the US Census Bureau launched its Tiger Map Service, one of the earliest web mapping services. Even with his slow modem connection to the internet, Stephen was amazed at the ability to explore the Census Bureau's Tiger line files and thematic maps online. Later, in our Mapping Our Changing World class, Stephen discovered the United States Geological Survey's digital raster graphics. As you know, DRG's are topographic maps that have been scanned and geo-referenced. That's when he started to see connections between maps and computers. As an Earth scientist working on the field, he'd always thought of topo maps as just printed things. Maps and the world really were changing. But it wasn't until his first job out of college that Stephen got to put these insights to work. After graduation in 1999, Stephen found a job in the Washington DC area as a policy analyst for a firm that was writing groundwater guidance documents for the US Environmental Protection Agency. Working at the desk next to him was Michael Lippmann. Mike had earned a bachelor's degree and then a master of public administration in environmental policy at Cornell. A fellowship at EPA brought him to DC where he later found work as a policy analyst at the same firm as Stephen. The coworkers shared an interest in the potential of web mapping and an early internet map server technology called ArcIMS, which their employer was just beginning to experiment with. The company sent Mike and Stephen to Redlands for training in the new technology. They made connections there that would serve them well later. Some of their employer's government agency clients wanted to begin mapping contaminated sites in the US. That provided Mike and Stephen's first foray into GIS. Although their employer didn't create the National Institutes of Health talks map shown here, the example does suggest what an ArcIMS-like web mapping app looked like in those days. Stephen and Mike began to envision how web GIS could be a game-changing technology, but electronic maps still seemed esoteric to most of their employer's clients. Even Google Maps was still years in the future, and the dot-com boom had recently gone bust. It would take a while longer before a business model based on web mapping in GIS would seem viable. In 2002, Stephen and Mike took the plunge and founded Blue Raster, LLC. In interviews for this case study, Stephen and Mike explained that the name Blue Raster is meant to connote the ability to capture complex reality systematically, and to represent it simply in ways that reveal the meaning their customers wish to convey. That's the value they aim to deliver with web GIS. Blue Raster's earliest contracts involved creating web mapping apps about radioactive contamination at research sites for the Department of Energy. The first of those sites was Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island. Brookhaven operated a high flux beam reactor used for scientific research from 1965 to 1996. According to the Department of Energy, the reactor was decommissioned in 1996 after tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen and a byproduct of reactor operations was found in nearby groundwater monitoring wells. Investigators subsequently found that contaminated water, quote, had been leaking from a spent fuel pool located in the basement of the reactor building for more than a decade. As urban development spread eastward on Long Island, public concern about contaminated groundwater increased. Years before the term open data was coined, Brookhaven commissioned Blue Raster to create web apps that provided maps and other site-specific information graphics needed to keep residents in the press informed. For example, users could drill down into monitoring well locations to view graphs like this that showed how tritium concentrations decreased at the wells with time and with restoration efforts. Functionality like that may seem obvious now, but it wasn't then, which leads me to wonder, what will users expect from web mapping apps 10 or 20 years in the future? Brookhaven engineers and contractors modeled and tracked the tritium plume and shared the data with Blue Raster for the website. Every week, Stephen and Mike would take an early morning flight from Baltimore, Washington International Airport to Islip, Long Island. After consulting with the engineers, they'd travel home to Washington on the last flight of the day. Brookhaven National Lab met its remediation targets and Blue Raster's public outreach was considered a success. Similar department of energy projects followed. In time, they were branded programmatically as land trek, but Brookhaven's success in meeting its goals convinced Mike and Stephen that Blue Raster needed to diversify. They experimented with maps for election campaigns and apps for the real estate market. They got their name out by participating in meetups in the DC area. Finally, one of their contacts at Esri introduced them to the World Wildlife Fund. The World Wildlife Fund had compiled a database of the global distributions of thousands of mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and birds. In 2004, WWF hired Blue Raster to design and build a web mapping app called Wildfinder that lets users search the WWF database and visualize eco regions in which species live. Mike explains that they built the first version of the web app with Arc Web Services, the technology that evolved later into ArcGIS online. In 2009, Blue Raster and WWF released Wildfinder 2, which is built on ArcGIS for server and flex. To keep pace with evolving technology, Blue Raster hopes to create an updated version built with the ArcGIS API for JavaScript. Working at the intersection of conservation and global affairs, Blue Raster began to hit its stride. The Wildfinder app became for a time one of the most visited areas of the World Wildlife Fund's site. Their success caught Esri's attention in just four years after its founding. Blue Raster was named business partner of the year in 2006. Remember this conceptual map of the WebGIS technology ecosystem from an earlier case study? Mike Lipman coauthored it. Like his collaborator, Robert Cheatham, Mike stresses that this should be considered a living document that's updated continuously. In the lower middle of the map, notice the cluster of technologies labeled map servers. One of Blue Raster's core competencies is the ability to deploy server technology as a means to publish geospatial data and interactive geo-apps on the web. One example of a project powered by server technology is Global Forest Watch, an initiative sponsored by the World Wildlife Institute. Global Forest Watch includes a suite of data, maps and apps all intended to help people everywhere to better protect forests. One of those apps is Global Forest Watch Fire. Shown here is Blue Raster's 2014 wireframe design of the Global Forest Watch Fire Analysis Interface. Driven by concern about the role of fire and deforestation and air pollution, WRI convened a partnership involving Blue Raster, Digital Globe, NOAA, and others to create a high resolution, near real-time, global fire monitoring system that anyone can access and use on the web. This is a design comp, a next stage in the app development process at which the customer's vision for the product and the developer's vision begin to converge. The live version I viewed in July 2017 reflects expanded functionality, including crowdsourcing. Global Forest Watch fires brings together several organizations and technologies. The MODIS satellite-based sensor is used to detect fires around the world. Daily updates of fire events are stored and served from ArcGIS for server. High-confidence fire events trigger the capture of high-resolution Digital Globe imagery, which is made available for near real-time viewing and analysis by the ArcGIS image extension for server. Global Forest Watch users can subscribe to fire alerts, which are delivered by email or text. And to help visualize the potential impact of air pollution, an open-source JavaScript routine is used to create animations of wind directions and speed every four hours. Blue Raster uses either ArcGIS Enterprise, which, as we called ArcGIS for server until version 10.5, or ArcGIS Online to serve their web maps and apps. The choice depends on project requirements. Other options are available, of course, including map server, geo server, and others. You'll have a chance to explore the alternatives if you take the Penn State course, cloud and server GIS. The ability to design a geospatial system architecture that responds to user needs is a key competency for Blue Raster and may be for you, too. In the video prelude to this case study, Christine Movius pointed out the importance of coding in a web mapping business like Blue Raster. Of the several languages shown in the web GIS technology ecosystem map, Python and its associated libraries are perhaps most important for GIS pros. Python is useful for automating repetitive tasks, for customizing desktop GIS interfaces, and for what data scientists call data wrangling. A common estimate is that up to 80% of data analysis is consumed with preliminary tasks of cleaning and preparing data. Python is widely used for such tasks. But as Python has matured, geoprocessing has emerged as another common usage. Libraries like PySAL, the Python Spatial Analysis Library, and application programming interfaces like the ArcGIS for Python API make Python an increasingly valuable tool for serving what Mike Lipman calls an increasing demand for more robust spatial analysis. One Blue Raster project that benefited from Python scripting is Landmark. In collaboration with the World Resources Institute and others, Blue Raster designed and built Landmark as the first global repository of community land rights data. According to WRI, as much as 65% of the world's land is held by indigenous peoples and local communities, but little more than 10% is recognized as belonging to them. The Landmark platform allows users to draw a shape on a map to query the attributes of communities within that area of interest. Blue Raster developer David Italberg used Python to calculate the quantity of indigenous and community lands within political borders. Landmark is useful precisely because it combines many disparate data sources in forms that allow further analysis and visualization. Stephen Ansari says that 10 years ago, GIS pros use desktop software to perform analysis and then produce derivatives that might be included in web maps. Today he says we're using Python to build repeatable systems that run in real time and can do on-the-fly combinations of data that are controlled by end users. He urges every GIS pro to hone their Python skills. Python scripting is specifically called out in the GTCM. Opportunities for Python training abound, including Penn State's online course, GIS programming and customization. The 2015 Paris Climate Conference was the 21st annual Conference of Parties at which representatives of 195 nations meet to assess progress in confronting and reversing human-induced climate change. In the lead up to the December conference, hopes were high that an international agreement to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius was possible. A mere two months before the conference, Blue Raster took a call from UNICEF, the United Nations Children Fund. Believe it or not, UNICEF discovered Blue Raster out of the blue with a Google search. UNICEF wanted to produce a compelling statement about the risks that climate change poses for the world's 2.3 billion people under age 18. They had lots of data and analysis, but no clear idea of how to tell a story that would make a difference in Paris and beyond. Stephen, Mike and Kevin McMaster engaged their clients in an iterative design and development process that soon yielded information products that helped crystallize UNICEF's story. For example, this map of the distribution of children living in flood occurrences zones combines UNICEF analysis with flood maps produced for the Aqueduct Online Water Resource Atlas, which Blue Raster developed with the World Resources Institute. Blue Raster succeeded in helping UNICEF complete its publication unless we act now in time for the Paris conference. Later, Stephen and Mike called it their proudest achievement to date. The experience and contacts they gained brought more collaborations with UNICEF, including Clear the Air for Children in 2016 and Thirsting for a Future in 2017. Following the Thirsting for a Future project, UNICEF policy analyst Nicholas Rees said, Blue Raster has helped us make the case for protecting children's access to safe water and sanitation. A common thread that connects Blue Raster's projects is their emphasis on helping clients define goals that are consistent with their organization's purpose and in crafting stories that advance those goals. To support Blue Raster's growth, Stephen and Mike look for employees who are good communicators, who can geo-enable their customers' data to tell stories with abundant information. Here they stand with Penn State alum Chris Gabris and Christina Fawn, who co-hosted my first visit to their offices in 2016. Chris recently developed the US National Arboretum's Botanical Explorer mobile app, which helps visitors and researchers explore the arboretum grounds and plant collections. Among many other things, Christina created the Story Maps starter kit we use in discourse. I asked Stephen and Mike how they determine whether an applicant has what it takes to be successful at Blue Raster. Their job interviews start with non-technical conversations about what excites applicants. They look for innate talent, good imagination, writing skills, public speaking ability, and especially excitement about geography. Next they look for tech skills such as programming, the JavaScript API, and newer JavaScript libraries, HTML5, and IT skills, such as server setup and administration. Mike remarked that they look for people who fill the gap between college curricula and the real world. They also seek applicants who are active in the community, as in dev meetups and user groups, and who assert thought leadership on the web. Finally and especially, they need people who know how to find things, who have the right mindset to learn collaboratively and independently, and who are energized to move on to the next level. These same traits that prepared Stephen and Mike to build a successful business in WebGIS are what we hope you will develop and build upon in your time with us at Penn State.