More than 14,000 GIS enthusiasts descended on San Diego in mid-June for ESRI’s annual User Conference, and three Azavea staff members were among them. Robert, Rachel, and Megan attended the conference where they made presentations on Azavea projects, shared a booth promoting the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s (OJJDP) SMART application (profiled in our last edition), attended workshops and technical sessions, and met other GIS practitioners from all over the world.

During the 5-day conference (June 18th – 22nd), we had the opportunity to present six projects on behalf of our clients: PhillyHistory.org and ParcelExplorer for the Philadelphia Department of Records, ConnectServices for the Delaware Valley Association for the Education of Young Children, the Metropolitan Philadelphia Indicators Project for Temple University, TRAMAH for the University of Pennsylvania’s Cartographic Modeling Lab, and the SMART application for OJJDP. Copies of several of these presentations are available for download in the Library section of our website. We were also excited to share booth space with OJJDP and Development Services Group (DSG) to promote the SMART project, offering live demonstrations of the application and answering questions about its use and capabilities. Azavea implemented SMART using our Kaleidocade Indicators Framework.

For new attendees (as two of us were), the ESRI User Conference can be a bit overwhelming. With so many participants, workshops and presentations it was tough to choose which sessions to attend, but it was thrilling to see the range of projects being carried out using GIS technology.