 How did you discover geographic information systems? Probably not on television. Although weather maps and other news maps appear frequently, you'll rarely see the analytics that distinguish GIS from ordinary mapping. And you'll never see a Super Bowl commercial about GIS. Maybe you have a family member or friend who works with GIS and told you about it. It's unlikely that you discovered GIS in grade school or high school. In the U.S. at least, geography is rarely included in school curricula. And despite decades of research, advocacy, and donated technology, few school teachers or administrators use GIS in their work. It's more likely that you first discovered GIS in college. Thousands of colleges and universities around the world offer classes, training, and support for GIS. And at least a quarter million students use GIS software in their studies every year. In fact, degree programs in geography in the U.S. describe themselves as discovery majors, because so few high school graduates are aware that the discipline even exists. This is the story of a young woman named Annika Shears, who discovered GIS in college, then rediscovered it after graduation. Calvin College is a well-regarded liberal arts school whose bucolic campus is in the city of Grand Rapids in western Michigan. Calvin's Department of Geology, Geography, and Environmental Studies has offered GIS classes since the 1990s. Here we see students at work in the James A. Clarke Geospatial Laboratory. After matriculating at Calvin as a history major, Annika found her way to geography. She learned to make maps like these in her GIS classes. The one on the left shows the results of buffer and raster analyses to determine census tracks with inadequate access to healthy groceries. On the right, Annika analyzed soil's data to identify property parcels best suited for viticulture. She fell in love with the rich analysis and visualization capabilities of ARCMAP. For Annika and students like her, GIS was synonymous with a single monolithic desktop software package. And GIS analysis generally meant a linear sequence of steps by which GIS transforms input data into information products like maps. Here's an example of a stepwise workflow diagram for a site selection analysis by Nate Stair of the homebrewing family, the Stair Brothers. Annika would soon discover that there's a lot more to modern GIS than she thought. In her senior year at Calvin, she applied and was selected for a prestigious Summer of Maps fellowship with Azavia. You learned a bit about Azavia and Summer of Maps in the video prelude to this case study. As founder Robert Cheatham puts it, Azavia is a B corporation that creates civic geospatial software and data analytics for the web. B corporations meet comprehensive social and environmental performance standards. The B corporation status emphasizes the triple bottom line of social responsibility, sustainability, and profitability. Azavia's offices are in the fifth floor of this building at 990 Spring Garden Street in Philadelphia. An inscription at the building's entrance says, This city was made from makers. Join the revival of innovation and creativity in the Spring Arts District. Here's what Azavia's workspace looked like in 2016, about six months after they'd moved in and around the time I visited. It's an open plan environment that encourages communication and collaboration. One example of Azavia's work is the Coastal Resilience Project, which it developed for the Nature Conservancy, and which won the 2014 United Nations Award for Best Professional and Scientific App for Disaster Risk Reduction. Her Summer of Maps fellowship paired Annika with the nonprofit American Red Cross. The Red Cross cosponsors Missing Maps, a program that promotes and organizes crowdsourced mapping of places where some of the world's most vulnerable people live. One of those places is the border region of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea at the epicenter of the Ebola outbreak of 2014. Using data from volunteer community surveys, Annika's project was to analyze and map vulnerability in relation to water accessibility and quality, household size, sanitation infrastructure, and high traffic areas. She performed statistical analyses to identify clusters of high and low vulnerability and to determine which vulnerability sectors were most significant. That much, she felt pretty well prepared to do. But the Red Cross sought to communicate her findings to employees and volunteers with an interactive web app. That would require HTML, CSS, and JavaScript coding using Leaflet, a JavaScript library for lightweight web and mobile geo-apps. Annika felt completely unprepared for this set of tasks. How, she wondered, would she ever learn all of this within a 12-week fellowship? Annika had rediscovered GIS as a broad and dynamic ecosystem of interrelated technologies and methods. Robert Cheatham sketched this conceptual map of the Web GIS technology ecosystem at my request in collaboration with Michael Lippmann of the mapping services firm Blue Raster in a 90-minute online whiteboarding session in August of 2016. The sketch map depicts data products and services, organizations, technologies and products, and languages that Robert and Mike felt were essential elements of the ecosystem at that time. Robert says, every time I see that diagram, I want to start editing it. We'll take a closer look at the contents of this map, their relationships and implications in our next lesson, which happens to be a case study about Blue Raster. For now, let's focus on how Annika came to grips with this daunting milieu. Annika succeeded because of a certain mindset. Author Gil Broza defines mindset as how you think about acting in a given situation. What Annika learned at Azavia is close to what Broza calls the agile mindset. Agile is a set of values, beliefs, principles and associated methods that emerged in response to dissatisfaction with an earlier approach called traditional or waterfall development. I didn't know it at the time, but I learned the waterfall development approach as a student of cartography in the 1980s. In those days, every layer of information that was to appear on a map had to be created as a physical layer of plastic film that cartographers engraved or drew on or affixed labels to by hand. Because every layer was labor-intensive to create and expensive to change, we learned to confirm customer requirements and commit to a design plan in advance, trusting that it would all turn out well in the end. The waterfall approach made sense when mapmaking was essentially a manufacturing process. A generation later, the linear, sequential approach to GIS analysis and visualization that Annika learned in college was still essentially waterfall. The agile mindset understands map and app development as an interactive process, not a once and for all design problem. Agile is an umbrella term that encompasses several methodologies. The primary agile method used at Azavia is called scrum. Ironically, scrum was inspired by continuous improvement and just-in-time manufacturing processes developed in Japan by Toyota and others. In rugby, a scrum is a formation of teammates who link together to gain possession of the ball and advance it toward the goal. In software and app development, teams identify a backlog of work to be done from user stories about desired project outcomes. Importantly, it's not assumed that either the project team or the client knows all of the project requirements in advance. The team then maps the backlog into a series of time-boxed sprints, each of which yields a working increment of software. Specific outcomes are determined at the sprint level, not the project level. During a sprint, each day begins with a brief stand-up meeting in which team members share status updates, identify impediments to be overcome, and set goals for the day's work. Along the way, clients are encouraged to interact with the team, to ask questions and pose challenges, and to expect the team to respond quickly to an evolving project vision. Another agile technique called Kanban is a workflow practice that's also inspired by Japanese product management. Here's a Kanban board used by an Azavia team to track the flow of project backlog through a queue to works-in-progress and finally to done. The core values of the agile mindset were first expressed in the manifesto for agile software development that a group of pioneers published in 2001. In contrast to traditional development, the agile mindset values individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan. Supporting the core value that people come first, one of the 12 principles of the agile manifesto is to build projects around motivated individuals, give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. Implicit in that principle is that agile organizations value continuing professional development and expect employees to know how to learn independently and collaboratively. Onika succeeded in her summer of maps fellowship because her Azavia mentors and colleagues helped her learn how to learn. I hope that's a mindset that you too will take away from this class and the ones that follow.