2024 AGIC Education and Training Symposium was a success. The Conference Committee is currently processing the proceedings and will post them soon. Follow the AGIC social media accounts or AGIC-L Listserv to find out when the proceedings are available and announcements for the 2025 Symposium.
Help us congratulate the award winners at this year's AGIC Symposium. Scroll down further for more details about each winner.
Congratulations also to the winners of the Maps & Apps Challenge, where GIS professionals and students were able to display their cartographic and analytic expertise. View their submissions, along with others, on the AGIC Symposium Maps & Apps Gallery.
John Danloe has been an active participant on the AGIC Conference Committee for greater than 5 years. He is quick to volunteer and is the primary coordinator of the exhibitors who support the AGIC Education and Training Symposium each year. Because of his efforts, AGIC executes a successful and profitable event that provides educational opportunities, professional networking, and information exchange for GIS professionals across Arizona. During the pandemic, John was central to organizing the virtual programming which replaced the in- person event typically held. He contributed to creative solutions, supported the development of a new conference and registration website, and was the point of contact for all exhibitor organization and support. John is a pleasure to work with, he creates a fun and engaging environment that is infectious and has a can-do attitude that motivates others and serves the Arizona Geospatial Community well. In addition to a fulltime job with Pima County, John also is the father of two toddlers. He somehow juggles his work and personal responsibilities while also volunteering for AGIC. John is overwhelmingly deserving of the Chairperson's Volunteer of the Year award. AGIC is fortunate to have John as a member of our geospatial community.
I am nominating David Enriquez for the Arizona Geospatial Volunteer of the Year. I met David over 20 years ago when he was the parent of one of my husband’s favorite middle school students. We have kept in touch with David on and off over the years, but I hadn’t seen him in about a decade. I bumped into David a few months and asked him what he has been up to since he sold his car repair business. He said he was volunteering for the Red Cross. Then I asked him what he was doing for them, and he said mapping things associated with Arizona fires. I asked for more details, and he went on for about 15 minutes about AGOL and the dashboards he makes for them. We ended up talking about how frustrating arcade is and about using hosted feature services and all sorts of things he is doing. The man knows more than many people who have been in the field for a decade, and he has been working on it less than a year. The Red Cross needed help and so he is starting with taking class and then taught himself how to make the maps and then taught himself how to build the online apps and dashboards. And since they don’t have enough people to do everything, he still works on taking phone calls at all hours of the day. In fact, the week I spoke to him he had just spent 19 hours in a row taking calls from people and then updating maps to support people with the Flagstaff fire earlier in that week. He said there was nobody else to do it because everyone else was out in the field. And all of this is volunteer! I have always known that David was incredibly kind, intelligent, and hardworking, but this goes even further than I ever dreamed. He has taken countless hours of his free time to learn a new field and apply it to making the world a better place. It is for that reason that I think David Enriquez should be AGIC’s Arizona Geospatial Volunteer of the Year.
Morgana Laurie has been nominated as an outstanding employee for the first half of 2022 for her creation of the DEMA Geographic Information System (GIS) Hub. Over the years, DEMA's Situation Unit team has created multiple online tools for real-time situational awareness. They have come in different forms from maps to graphs to real-world images. Morgana took these existing tools and combined them into a "one-stop shop" that is easy to read and navigate on one simple dashboard. It is already being recognized nationally by ESRI, the world’s leading mapping technology company, by displaying the Hub in their "examples" gallery. Other agencies are already working within their respective GIS teams to create a similar model to the Hub. This product was primarily created for the Governor's Office so that they could have real-time, easy-to-read, and understand situational awareness for statewide emergency incidents. It also benefits County and tribal emergency managers, other state agencies, and DEMA staff. Benefits include improving situational awareness, and better coordination and response to disaster events. https://adem- azdema.hub.arcgis.com/.
During the presentations, the AGIC Lifetime Achievement Award was renamed the Gene Trobia Lifetime Achievement Award to honor Gene Trobia, past State Cartographer where he was a major influence on the future of AGIC.
Rudy Stricklan is well known to both the Arizona GIS and Surveying communities. Many know him for his entertaining, and often standing room only, presentations at the AGIC conference with his various personas such as Brother Geo or Rip van Geowinkle. But I know Rudy as a long-time champion for the Arizona geospatial community. When I first met Rudy in the early 1990's he was the Private Sector representative on the AGIC Board. He was instrumental in establishing the State Cartographer's Office and was also on the hiring committee that brought us Gene Trobia, Arizona's first State Cartographer and one of last year's recipients of the AGIC Lifetime Achievement Award. Rudy has also served on the AGIC Admin & Legal Committee and the Height Modernization Work Group. Rudy has been a Registered Land Surveyor in Arizona for over 45 years and is a charter member of the Arizona Professional Land Surveyors (APLS). A strong proponent for advancing the geospatial industry, in 2006 he helped to bridge the divide between the surveying and GIS communities as a founding member of the APLS Geospatial Committee. From his adventures with wearable technology to explorations in open-source GIS, he is always on a quest for new technology to learn about and share with others. He has taught geospatial courses for both the University of Arizona and the Arizona State GIS master's degree programs. He also continues to develop and teach hands-on workshops at the AGIC Symposium. There are many throughout the geospatial community that consider Rudy a mentor and many more that consider him a friend. For his decades-long dedication to the Arizona geospatial community and his continued commitment to helping others grow in this industry, I nominate Rudy Stricklan for the 2022 AGIC Lifetime Achievement Award.
Gary Irish managed the Arizona Land Resources Information System (ALRIS), which is the GIS for the State of Arizona, for over 20 years. He was a driving force for developing GIS in the Arizona State Land Department (ASLD). Gary was also instrumental in getting a SunSparc workstation and Arc/Info license to the Arizona Department of Economic Security (ADES) and allowed the use of the ASLD plotter and “Mona” (the guest workstation at ASLD) since ADES had no output device at the time other than a tape drive. He also set up GIS training classes at ASLD for other agencies. This was typical of how Gary fostered the development of GIS in many State agencies. In 1986, when I first started managing the Pima County GIS, we were told by a consultant that it would cost us over $200,000 for them to develop geographic data for use in our GIS. I contacted Gary and he delivered all the available ALRIS Pima County data to our office for free. It was a big boost for Pima County to quickly get up and running. It also helped us to develop products to show our county leadership that GIS was a worthwhile technology. Today Pima County is one of the top GIS operations in Arizona. Over time, I saw Gary do this over and over again. In leading by example, he encouraged inter-agency cooperation and coordination throughout the state. Gary was instrumental in the development and expansion of the Arizona Geographic Information Council (AGIC). He oversaw and administered the activities of AGIC for many years. Gary encouraged and supported holding MAGIC, the first statewide GIS conference, which became the annual AGIC Education & Training Symposium, the major event and venue for sharing information about GIS and geospatial technologies in Arizona. Through Gary's coordination and leadership, AGIC recommended the establishment of the Arizona State Cartographer's Office (SCO) in statute. The SCO was established in statute in 1986, and through Gary's continuing efforts, was funded and filled in 1996. The State Cartographer worked hand-in-glove with ALRIS and the ASLD GIS to promote and coordinate the development of GIS into many state, local, and tribal agencies, universities and the private sector. Gary was also one of the original state members of the National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC) which is an organization dedicated to the development and use of GIS for good government. When the SCO was established, Gary supported the State Cartographer's involvement with NSGIC as a way for Arizona to benefit from what worked and didn't work in other states. Over the years, Arizona has benefited, and continues to benefit, in many ways because of AGIC and the SCO's strong participation in NSGIC. When Gary became the ASLD GIO and then CIO, in addition to his other responsibilities, he continued to support the advancement of GIS throughout Arizona. Gary was always available to support AGIC, the SCO and many agencies throughout the State of Arizona until he retired after over 25 years of service. For these and many other professional and personal reasons, I believe Gary Irish is worthy of receiving the AGIC Lifetime Achievement Award.
Nov 7 2024 - 10:00am to 12:00pm
Nov 12 2024 - 1:00pm to 2:00pm
Nov 20 2024 - 1:00pm to 2:30pm
