Minutes of the 41st Quarterly Salt Lake GIS Users Group (SLUG) meeting, held on August 14, 2019, from 11:30 am to 1:00 pm at the Department of Natural Resources (1594 West North Temple) in Salt Lake City. There were about 80 people in attendance today.
Business
Michael Duncan, SLUG Board
Welcome to the Department of Natural Resources. Thanks to DNR for hosting and Gateway Mapping for sponsoring the lunch.
This meeting’s lunch was sponsored by Gateway Mapping. If you have any contacts that would be willing to ‘sponsor’ a lunch by providing food/drinks in exchange for their advertising at the meeting, contact Neal Fraser, SLUG Board member.
Welcome to our new board members: Corey Mecham and Rachel Manko. If there is any more interest in being a board member, please reach out to a board member.
Bruce Cheney, Gateway Mapping
Bruce introduced Gateway Mapping and the people (via PowerPoint) who make it up, what their roles are, and what they like to do. Bruce had attendees put their business cards in a bucket and raffled off a map book at the end of the meeting.
Presentations
Wade Kloos, Utah DNR
Wade talked about how to assess the value that your GIS is producing by using a GIS Return on Investment (ROI). It can be hard to define the GIS produced value but luckily the DNR created a simple ROI process that can be found here to do for your own department. This can help figure out what your organizational value is and make us more aware of the importance of what we chose to work on.
Eric Edgley, Utah DWR
Eric talked about how the DWR using their wildlife tracking to produce a real time tracking feed which in turn helps them to better manage animals and plan products. They were able to track a Razorback Sucker who traveled 942 miles in Colorado and Utah over 7 years! ESRI did a case study on the Utah Department of Natural Resources showing how they use GIS to track pelicans, moose, and deer. Check out that video here.
Andrew Thorup and Richard Ramirez, City of West Jordan
West Jordan use UtiliSync, a way to automate your document workflow, to help manage their storm water system. With UtiliSync, they can see where all their sites are located when they are doing inspections. West Jordan is also implementing ESRI’s Solution for Local Government, Adopta, to get the public more involved in helping to keep storm drains clean and clear. They also are using a citizen service request app so West Jordan citizens can report on happenings in their neighborhood.
Geography Humor Segment - Zlatko Grebenar, SLUG Board
Sir Peter Jackson helps fight to put New Zealand back on world maps
Google Maps Shortcut in Colorado turns into ‘muddy mess’ with ‘a hundred cars’
You can see many of the videos we’ve shown (not including the above one) at SLUG meetings on our own YouTube channel HERE.
The next meeting will be Tuesday, November 12, 2019 at Gardner Commons at the University of Utah (260 Central Campus Drive), more info coming soon.
If anyone is interested in being on the board please reach out, we do have some board members who will be stepping down in the near future.
Thank you to our presenters and our venue.
If you have any ideas for a presentation or any other matter, please contact a SLUG board member. We appreciate your interest and support!