Welcome to NACIS 2015 in Minneapolis! This is the annual meeting of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS). The theme for this year’s meeting is Mapping Interactions. See the schedule below and go to the NACIS website for more details.
The North American Cartographic Information Society, founded in 1980, is an organization comprised of specialists from private, academic, and government organizations whose common interest lies in facilitating communication in the map information community.
For those of you who were unable to attend the conference, or who couldn’t clone themselves to be at multiple talks at once, many slides are linked in the session descriptions below. Twin Cities local Kitty Hurley also put together this fantastic document summarizing much of what she saw at the meeting, so if slide decks aren’t linked, check out her notes.
University of Minnesota researchers developed three geodesign applications to assist stakeholders explore land-use decision making in various settings. The applications allow stakeholder groups to draw design scenarios on 55” touch-sensitive displays, receive real-time feedback on various parameters related to land use change (e.g. water quality, carbon sequestration, biodiversity, development suitability and impacts), and discuss and revise plans until scenarios achieving the “best fit” among multiple criteria are realized. Through “hands-on” use of the system, workshop attendees will learn: 1) the computer technology needed to create a geodesign system, 2) the soft technology needed to engage stakeholders in collaborative and iterative geodesign processes, 3) use of an “adaptive design” process to engage multiple stakeholders in constructing and evaluating alternative design scenarios, and 4) evaluation of the social and transformative learning that occurs among stakeholders engaged in collaborative geodesign processes.