GIS Rules in Portland during the 6th Annual International GIS Day celebration

For the 6th consecutive year, the local Portland GIS Community held an event to celebrate geography, maps, and everything geospatial.  With a Missing Maps Mapathon and an evening GIS social held at the Ecotrust Conference space, we had exhibits, displays and presentations that attracted close to 140 GIS students and professionals.  

The GIS celebrations began in the afternoon with Emily Eros, American Red Cross, leading a group in the Missing Maps Mapathon.  Over 30 students, professionals, and community members came together to add buildings to OSM in an under-mapped area of Myanmar that is highly vulnerable to natural disasters.  Thanks to the PSU geography department for use of the lab,  and to Aaron Eubank and Alicia Milligan for assistance with the computers and music selection! 

During the GIS Day Social at Ecotrust, attendees had the opportunity to play around with Matthew Hampton's augmented reality sandbox table, Quantum Spatial's topology model created by a group of elementary school students from cardboard, and learn more about the Society for Conservation GIS (SCGIS).   Attendees also had an opportunity to win a wide variety of raffle prizes that included maps from Ecotrust and DOGAMI, books from Esri and SCGIS, T-shirts from PCC, and tote bags from ESRI.  

The keynote speaker, Emily Eros from the American Red Cross, gave a presentation on the Missing Maps project that inspired the crowd to be active participants in the worldwide effort to map vulnerable communities and enable fast, life-saving disaster response.  Madeline Steele provided a warm welcome, acknowledged our sponsors, and spoke briefly about the GIS Certificate program at Portland Community College (PCC).  Jocelyn Tutak, Ecotrust, welcomed everyone to the event space and introduced Ecotrust's efforts in advancing social equity, economic opportunity, and environmental well-being.  Camille Westlake, ASPRS & Quantum Spatial, also spoke about both organizations and promoted the opportunity for GIS professionals to get involved with ASPRS in open Board member positions.  

A very special thanks to our sponsors - Quantum Spatial, American Red Cross, Portland Community College - Geography, ASPRS, URISA, Ecotrust, Metro, DOGAMI, Esri, PDX-OSGeo, and Society for Conservation GIS. The success of our event is due to the large community support provided by all these organizations.

Our annual GIS day events are put together by GIS community members Madeline Steele, Christina Friedle & Alexa Todd, who volunteer their time to ensure that there is at least one day a year that the Portland GIS community comes together to celebrate our work and discipline.   Thank you also to PCC student volunteers Hilary Hobbs, Liam Neely-Brown, and Christina Sjoquist for checking everyone in and taking photographs!