Can you give me some background on your experience as a volunteer?
After getting out of college with a degree in forestry with a minor in spatial information management, I decided that instead of going straight to a desk job I would get out and do something active for a while, so I started fighting fire. In pursuit of a career in the emergency management field I started volunteering at the Mile High chapter of the American Red Cross in November 2009. When I overheard the GIS Project Leader there, Sarah Jarman, saying that they were starting a Geographic Information System (GIS) project I volunteered my expertise. I’m now the GIS Specialist for the chapter, working with Jason Finehout, the Disaster Response Coordinator who is overseeing the project.  We’re using Microsoft Office products and Depiction, along with several open source tools such as MapWindow, OpenStreetMap and other public domain resources.

 

One of the key trends we’re watching is the way individuals are gaining the abilities to do things that previously required large organizations. How have you seen that play out in your experience as a volunteer and in GIS?
When I was in school studying GIS, it was pretty much necessary to have either a team of people to accomplish a GIS or a large pocketbook.  Getting aerial or satellite imagery was expensive and you would usually end up with something that needed to be manipulated in order to be useful.  If you did have your own imagery you had to digitize it, which was tedious and time consuming and if you had data in a database or spreadsheet it usually was not a few simple steps to visually display it.  Now with Depiction capturing aerial photography for our background, dragging and dropping our Excel spreadsheets and georeferencing images onto a a depiction is something I can do myself in no time at all.

 

Another trend is the increased availability of data, both geospatial data and other types. Do you have a couple favorite sources for public geospatial data?
Most of the data that we’re using that the chapter didn’t already have on hand came through Depiction. Depiction offers a great opportunity to bring in free data from sources without knowing where to look for it. In fact, most of the raw data that we are using is in the form of spreadsheets, and Depiction made it really easy to visually display all that information. In the past, it wasn’t anywhere near that easy.

 

The third trend, which goes along with both of the other two, is the increased capability for people and organizations to collaborate and share information to make better decisions. How do you see that playing out in your project so far?
I see the collaboration coming in the near future. The Red Cross uses the disaster response cycle—mitigating disaster, planning for disaster, responding to disaster and recovering from disaster as a learning tool. I looked at that cycle and thought about where GIS fit into it, and decided that the culmination of GIS in that cycle is tabletop simulation. Depiction, specifically makes that a much easier task with the live reports and the ‘what if’ technology. In the past, it’s taken a lot of coordination—it takes live actors, it takes a whole day if not more to conduct, and when you’re doing exercises with multiple agencies it is even harder to organize. With Depiction, it shouldn’t be so complicated or time consuming. One person can set up a simulation, and the ability to send and receive reports means that people don’t even need to be in the same room to practice their response.

 

Can you tell me a bit more about what you are doing with the Geographic Information System?
We put together a list of things that we wanted to do with a GIS, and there were obviously hundreds, but we went through and picked a few that we wanted to start with. What we decided on was a small-scale disaster, such as a single-family house fire, and what it will be used for is the Disaster On-call volunteers will be able to look at the depiction on the Depiction website and find the closest shelter to send the clients to. We’re also preparing for future needs of the GIS, so we’ve also been mapping our assets, such as facilities and mobile trailers.

 

Do you have any advice for a volunteer organization or an individual volunteer who wants to make use of geospatial technology?
Don’t think that you need one singular software program to do it all, and don’t limit yourself to finding the one golden software. Especially for a volunteer organization like the Red Cross, they don’t have the budget to purchase a single expensive software system, and even if they do, they’re probably not going to be lucky enough to have a GIS specialist volunteering for them, or to have the budget to add one to their payroll. Building a GIS has four key functions: gathering data, storing data, manipulating data and displaying data. You don’t necessarily need one piece of software that does all those things—you just need a system that does all those things. In our case, we’re using multiple programs to accomplish those four functions.