Connected Nation in Attendance at Esri International User Conference

By Ashley Littell, Manager, GIS Services

This past week in San Diego, California, a contingent of Connected Nation’s GIS Services Team was in attendance at the Esri International User Conference. This event is considered to be the premier conference for GIS, mapping, and any other geospatial needs in today’s market.

The event this year was record-breaking, as Esri President Jack Dangermond indicated at Monday’s Plenary Session that there were almost 15,000 attendees this year, making it the largest group to ever attend the annual Esri event.

A variety of technical sessions, exhibits, special interest group meetings, and map galleries were spread throughout the agenda, providing an overwhelming number of resources for GIS professionals. The conference provides an opportunity to learn more about the power of GIS through technical workshops, forthcoming features and software releases, and a chance to network with other GIS users to discuss challenges and successes in their own environments.

One particularly beneficial event, just in its second year on the agenda, was the GIS Managers’ Open Summit. This event was designed to bring together a subset of the GIS community in management, a supervisor or director role, and even C-level executives in attendance at the conference. Considered an “unconference” event, the summit provided a mix of user presentations and breakout sessions to “engage in conversations with peers on topics that relate to business efficiencies, ROI, managing data,” and other ideas presented by those in attendance.

"The User Conference was an awe-inspiring event showcasing amazing new product capabilities with technical sessions and demonstrations on virtually every topic imaginable,” said Sarah Finne, Connected Nation GIS analyst. “GIS has made so many advancements in the last couple of years, especially with public data exchange and Web mapping. It was exciting and very informative to learn from these industry leaders and developers."

Connected Nation has had staff at the conference each year since 2008.

For more information, please check out the Esri UC Blog.