From Eric creighton, ILGISA President:
As I ventured into the year being into President-Elect of ILGISA, I looked forward to observing the organization with a different purpose and an all-encompassing goal. My omnipresence would ensure that going into the year of my Presidency I would have a thorough understanding of all things ILGISA. Shortly after I began my tenure as President-Elect, I received a call that swiftly evolved my role into the President of ILGISA. While the passage was unconventional, the support of the ILGISA Board and CM Services provided a fluid transition. But most importantly, the reason for this transition was that our President, Justin Nettleton, had the opportunity to continue his career in San Diego, CA. We thank Justin for his hard work and dedication to ILGISA and wish him and his family the brightest of futures.
ILGISA has a busy year ahead, with Regional Meetings in full swing, several ad-hoc committee’s and initiatives that support the growth of GIS within the state, and the annual ILGISA conference this fall. That change of an officer role set in motion a series of others. Chad Sperry was appointed as the President-Elect by the board for the remainder of the calendar year. Filling Chad’s position of Treasurer is Jason Verachtert. That fulfillment left a ILGISA Board Member position vacant and was unanimously filled by the board with Seth Stark, the GIS Administrator for the City of Decatur, Illinois. We are very pleased that Seth has accepted the role and are very excited for his contributions to come. Many changes have occurred in these past months, nonetheless ILGISA’s focus and goal to advance GIS in the state of Illinois remains intact.
ILGISA has a busy year ahead, with Regional Meetings in full swing, several ad-hoc committee’s and initiatives that support the growth of GIS within the state, and the annual ILGISA conference this fall. That change of an officer role set in motion a series of others. Chad Sperry was appointed as the President-Elect by the board for the remainder of the calendar year. Filling Chad’s position of Treasurer is Jason Verachtert. That fulfillment left a ILGISA Board Member position vacant and was unanimously filled by the board with Seth Stark, the GIS Administrator for the City of Decatur, Illinois. We are very pleased that Seth has accepted the role and are very excited for his contributions to come. Many changes have occurred in these past months, nonetheless ILGISA’s focus and goal to advance GIS in the state of Illinois remains intact.
New ILGISA Blog: GeoTalk
GIS Notes has been a staple of ILGISA since the summer of 2000, sometimes as an annual publication, sometimes biannually. If you know your ILGISA history, you will note that that was five years (or six depending on who you talk to) after the inception of the association. In fact, GIS Notes itself was a combination of two publications: the ILGISA Newsletter and Dr Dahlberg's Illinois Mapnotes - some of which are available on Google Books. In 1999, the Board surveyed the membership concerning publications and realized that there continued to remain a strong desire to focus on Case Studies and Training Articles for this new publication. ILGISA hired a managing editor for GIS Notes and intended that they would turn out at least three volumes a year! This never happened; but for the last 17 years, GIS professionals in Illinois have had a place to publish and discuss their mapping projects.
This same focus will now continue on in the form of the ILGISA blog. Having evolved into the most relevant form of disseminating information, this blog will allow for easy linking to online applications and better resource collaboration. We will continue to promote Illinois GIS projects in and around the state with particular emphasis on case studies from our membership and training articles. All of the same committee reports and messages from the president that you have come to love will still be published. We, as the outreach committee, intend to publish articles once a month at first, then more often as articles begin to backlog. The image on the right is a snip from the first GIS Notes and the result of the ILGISA Board's membership survey noted above.
I want to personally thank all of the GIS Notes editors from the last 17 years. And I will leave you with the same final paragraph from the original GIS Notes, co-edited by Don Luman and Larry Gunderson (with a slight modification at the beginning):
GeoTalk will continue to evolve as the principal publication (Blog) of the Illinois GIS Association. Therefore, we encourage readers to provide us continuing feedback on this new publication so that we can make it as responsive to the membership as possible.
-Micah Williamson Outreach Committee Chairman, on behalf of the entire committee
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