ESRI Conference -- Day Three

If you've been following the ESRI thread here you know that the ESRI Educational User Conference has been going on for a couple days now. I've known since I signed up for this conference that the dates for the event I was attending overlapped with another conference being held also in San Diego...namely the 2004 ESRI International User Conference (August 9-13).

This being my first time in joining any ESRI convention, I wondered how many people would be attending the educational user conference. I soon found out that it was upwards of 800 people, a healthy number it seemed to me.

Then, yesterday, as the International User Conference is about to begin, someone happened to mention that the expected number of participants at this related event is 13,000. Yes, that's 13 with three zeros!

With that little tidbit of information in mind, I knew that the scope of things was about to change. First on today's agenda was a video orientation to the IUC. I duly headed over to the San Diego Convention Center (the IUC is being held in the huge San Diego Convention Center, not the Marriott) wondering what 13,000 chairs looked like. Well, it looks like a sea of chairs in row after row after orw. Three convention halls were combined into one. Above our heads were sets of huge pairs of video screens which projected whatever was onstage. Wow! I thought. This is a BIG DEAL!

The video did a nice job of laying out the IUC day by day. There followed a talk by the Jack Dangermond, President of ESRI. His presentation went on for an hour or so. A most effective speaker, Mr. Dangermond welcomed all of us to the conference, noting that the first ESRI conference in 1981 was attended by a grand total of eleven. The next year the grand total grew to 17. Amazing to think about the growth since then.

I hope the Mr. Dangermond's talk is sometime made available. To an extent it was cheer-leading and a sales talk. But much of it was a good discussion of and demonstration of many of the powers of GIS and its software in ways that contribute to society, including in our work in the classroom.

He spent some time looking back and looking ahead. One of the "wow" demos he included was a table that served GIS images on it on a touch-screen that could be manipulated by people gathered around it. I'm guessing it was 4'X5' or so. What a great invention and collaborative piece of hardware. No one mentioned the price and I'm not about to request one for school, but it was a tantalyzing taste of some of the amazing things we're going to see come along in the not-so-distant future.

The keynote speaker, Dr. Rita R. Colwell, former Director of the National Science Foundation, gave a heartening talk. She has dedicated 25 or more years of her life trying to eradicate cholera, particularly in Bangladesh. She obviously feels deeply about the need to address world health issues and included examples of how GIS can help chart disease and predict outbreaks.

A different sort of day, then. More looking at ESRI from the standpoint of the company and a more general application of GIS in the world. Tomorrow the final sessions in the EdUC Conference take place. There also are some presentations in the IUC that look well worth attending.