A Really, Really Good State GIS Conference

Last week I attended the 2011 North Carolina GIS Conference in Raleigh. The conference is bigger than a lot of national conferences and attracts folks from North Carolina and surrounding states. I’ve actually been attending this conference throughout my career, starting with my US EPA days through IBM and now as a representative of Farragut. I’ve been to a lot of state GIS conferences, and I have always been particularly impressed with this conference and the state of GIS technology in North Carolina. The quality of papers and general information that you pull out of this conference has always been impressive.

One of the things that seem to make this conference better is that they only hold it every other year, which seems to increase the quality of presentation as well as prevent some of the burnout associated with running a conference every year (speaking from experience since I’ve been on URISA’s Integrating GIS and CAMA Technologies Conference committee for about 10 years). They also do a very good job at recruiting papers which helps to improve the overall quality of the papers. They have some really good and dedicated folks (many of which have become friends over the years) running the conference. If you ever get the chance to attend this conference, you’ll find it well worth your time, even if you’re not from North Carolina.