The first ESRI UC was held in 1981. 16 people attended. This year over 10,000 people from 6000 organisations and 144 countries attended the conference held in the San Diego Convention Centre. ESRI CEO Jack Dangermond thought it to be the biggest gathering of GIS professionals ever.

The conference was ESRI's opportunity to promote ArcGIS10 which is a major release for them. They also promoted a number of what can be loosely called Web 2.0 initiatives including iPhone and Android APIs, a global community mapping project, a new REST API standard and free online Landsat imagery.

A good example of the use of the iPhone API can be seen at http://www.citysourced.com/. It's an application for smart phones which enable people to photograph things that they think need attention and submit the photo and information to the relevant city authority.

The keynote presenter was Richard Saul Wurman, a designer who was a pioneer in making information easily accessible. He coined the phrase "information architect" in the 1970s. Much of his talk was about his project www.192021.org. It is a study of 19 cities with 20 million people or more in the 21st century. He gave a great example of (non-geospatial) crowd-sourcing with http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com.

The most entertaining talk I attended was on the history of GIS. It was very light-hearted and a great antidote to the technical overdose I was suffering by the end of the conference. Have a look at this in-car navigation system from the early 80s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electro_Gyrocator or http://tinyurl.com/2zkptn for more.

There were many interesting vendor stands and map displays. The overall winning map in the map gallery was a schematic world map made up of footballs. See page 42 of this pdf: http://www.esri.com/events/user-conference/pdfs/map-gallery-awards.pdf. Closer to home the Auckland Regional Council won a place for their map of the Waitakere Ranges. See page 11 in the same pdf.

In conclusion it was very worthwhile attending the ESRI UC. There was a consensus at the conference that ESRI are moving in the right direction with their software. Although ESRI is now a big company there still a sense of community among its users and this is one of its strengths. It was particularly good to talk to other GIS professionals from different countries and see that they are facing similar challenges to us.

Ian Harrison

GIS Analyst
Land Information New Zealand