Yes indeed, after one of the longest, snowiest winters in recent memory, I’m eagerly anticipating the upcoming Association of American Geographers meeting in sunny Tampa, Florida. I’m going to be presenting in two venues, first the alt.conference on Big Data where I will be discussing (quickly – like lightning) different models of government adoption of crowdsourced data. Second, I’m doing a more conventional presentation on the challenges of jurisdictionality in government adoption of the Geoweb. See a trend here? As governments catch up to an increasingly plugged-in population, we need to collectively investigate how and if government can interact with citizens through digital methods. Lots of interest here, but it certainly remains to be seen how government can both capitalize and will be affected by digital communications.
One other session that I can’t wait for is the return of the ‘tribes’ discussion (sounds like a sequel, indeed!). I missed the original session a few years back, so I’m eager to see where we are at now – are there really distinct ‘tribes’, and if so, what does this mean for research, teaching, industry, and especially how our students identify with whatever we are teaching them (GIScience, cartography, geomatics, ?). Should be interesting!
See you in Tampa!