GIS Cooperative - City of Tucson

GIS Training Committee Meeting
July 25, 2000
City Information Technology

Present: Donald Ijams, Vickey Bagley, Anna Sanchez, Lee Levin, Linda Lopez, Bill Burris, Virginia Carroll and Larry Cassen

Basic GIS Concepts Course

The Basic GIS Concepts Course received a great deal of discussion. A number of approaches were considered.

1. Through follow-up of a July 2000 Government Technology article, the Fairfax County, Va three part GIS training process was discussed in depth. Fairfax currently offers three courses on a regular basis:

Fairfax GIS Overview Class (3 hrs)
Basics of ArcView (self-paced, first portion of ESRI Virtual Campus course)
Using ArcView with Fairfax County Data (2 days)

A contact had been made with the article's author and the PowerPoint presentations used in their courses were distributed in printed form to committee members for discussion. Members were impressed with the approaches taken and believed that these products would provide a good guide for local development of similar programs.

2. A second approach to design of a basic concepts course was considered, involving professionally developed video products. Possible products include those from the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA), entitled "Introduction to GIS" (approx. 4 hrs) and "The URISA Leadership Video: Government's Information Solution" (17 minutes). The committee agreed that these products looked promising and should be explored by purchasing a single copy for evaluation purposes.

Issues of who would deliver a basic concepts course, how often and where it would be held, were also discussed.

GIS Analysis Training

The Fairfax County, Virginia customized ArcView course, and previous discussion of ArcView training (Focus May Be Wrong . . .) on June 23, highlighted the issues facing the committee in supporting would-be GIS analysts with appropriate training.

The attraction of a customized, locally delivered ArcView training class was significant, given that subsequent orientation to local data sets was frequently delivered after the standard ESRI course. Perhaps a locally integrated course could be produced that would serve our needs. Vickey Bagley and Anna Sanchez agreed to look into this possibility, and indicated their likely availability to teach the course as well.

GIS Training Conferences and Courses

GIS conferences occur throughout the year, and under the right circumstances, offer benefits to employees in doing their jobs better and benefits to the City through exposure to best practices, knowledgeable practitioners from other locales, and state-of-the-art technology and applications. The committee agreed that some portion of GIS Cooperative training funds should go to support selected conference attendance. The committee was also very interested in assuring that GIS Cooperative training funds were used as secondary sources, after department and other training funds were used.

Anna Sanchez and Vickey Bagley offered to research a list of GIS conferences that regularly occur throughout the year, so that allocation of conference funds can be better planned as the year unfolds.

Draft criteria for judging requests for financial support for conference attendance were presented to the committee. After discussion and slight alteration, the following guidelines were adopted:

When a request for GIS-related conference attendance comes in, we should look for the presence of positives to be gained and for the absence of negatives to be avoided by granting the request for support.

These positives and negatives are as follows:

Presence of Positives

- Sufficient potential for job-related benefits
- Sufficient potential for enterprise/infrastructure/development benefits
- Sufficient potential for other specified benefits
- Good use of GIS Cooperative training funds vs. other funding possibilities

Absence of Negatives

- Use of resources too concentrated in one area
- Questionable use of taxpayer dollars - perception problems
- Total resource available vs. alternate uses

With regard to GIS Cooperative financial support for training courses, the following items were identified as screening criteria:

1. Does the prospective trainee have the software to be trained on installed on a computer available to them? GIS training will be of little value if person cannot use it directly after the course.

2. Is the use for the training identified? Will the proposed training support ongoing service delivery or is the use of a "one time only" nature? Will the person receiving training continue to be employed in a City position where the training can be used?

3. GIS Cooperative training support is intended to be complementary to City departments' own training programs and budgets. Can the department pay for this training?

The GIS Cooperative Training Committee agreed that the Committee chair (currently Vickey Bagley) and the GIS Cooperative chair (currently Donald Ijams) will receive conference attendance and training requests to judge them against the criteria. For those requests passing the criteria, the Cooperative chair will initial the request and route it through City Information Technology to City Budget and Research.

GIS Training Budget

The Training Committee wrestled with setting a budget for the use of training funds. A limit of no more than one quarter of the funds for conference attendance support was tentatively adopted. A combination of slots for ESRI training of various types and funds for training materials, instructor pay, books and training session support will comprise a draft budget to be prepared. After Committee review, the draft will be presented in a general meeting the GIS Cooperative for adoption.

The Committee emphasized that the budget should be considered a rough guide to planned expenditures, given the possibility that in-house courses might take the place of paid-for training slots.