Tucson Area GIS Co-op April 2007 Meeting Minutes

(Apologies if your name is not shown or misspelled – If you didn’t sign the “Sign-in” sheet or your handwriting isn’t clear, it won’t appear correctly.)

• Co-op members from DSD asked if additional funding was available to assist with DSD members who wish to attend the conference. DSD was asked to submit a written request and if funds were still available the membership would consider this request. The Coop voted to cover lodging expenses up to $1,100.00 each to Bill Marum and Johana Kraus of DSD.

Anna Sanchez and Jessie Reyes of DUP will be attending the ESRI Conference, in which the Co-op will help with funding a portion of their expenses as well.

Congratulations to you all!

• Dave Koss reported that the City has nine ArcGIS licenses that are available for use by City Co-op members on a TDOT sponsored license server. (Three from the Co-op and six from TDOT)
• PAG and the GIS Coop are jointly sponsored an intro to ArcGIS class on April 17^th and 18^th.
• Jennifer Sborov spoke on the Building GeoDatabases/Linear Referencing class at SAIAT. The class will be a total of 4 days coming this summer (July or August). Please contact Jennifer if you are interested in attending the class. The Co-op will discuss purchasing some seats for this class at the next Co-op meeting.
• ARC 9.2 Service Pack 2 is now available from the ESRI website.
• Steve Whitney was not available to give an update on the Web Portal but his email indicated that a power point presentation and flyer would be available on the Co-op website for review and comment by Co-op members.

• The Coop’s fiscal ’06 – ’07 and fiscal ’07 – ’08 budgets were discussed. The Co-op voted to continue to fund the intern position next fiscal year. We will fund salaries and hardware. Mike Hicks from TDOT offered to assist the Co-op with hardware and space needs for the program. The intern will work on various projects as decided on by the Co-op membership. Also, there is still some money available in this year’s budget for hardware. If you have a need please submit your request to one of the Co-chairs prior to the next meeting.
• A final call was made for volunteers to be Co-chairs of the Co-op for the next fiscal year. The sixth member finally volunteered to complete the 6-member team. The Co-op team will be introduced in the June minutes. Thank you all for making this happen.

A proposal for an Executive Committee was announced. It would consist of 3 Co-op members making executive decisions for the Co-op. This committee will help manage and guide Co-chairs with organizational functions. Dave Koss, Blanca Espino and Steve Whitney have shown interest for these positions. If you would like to be considered for a position, please send Blanca Espino an email at Blanca.Espino@tucsonaz.gov A date will be set for a group or email vote.

• PAG Ortho ’08 Project – The project team is currently working on a draft RFP.
• Bill Marum spoke on “City Sync”. The group has developed an Access database to supplement the existing metadata contained within the ESRI shapefiles. The purpose is to chart the relationships among the various layers. Several relationships have been defined and the layers used by Development Services have been analyzed to define their relationships. The group is exploring ways to involve more City departments in the development and maintenance of the layer relationship database."

Bill suggested that someone/group should maintain this list to keep various departments and organizations informed of updates or needed corrections.

• Cody Cohn asked about distribution of extra “complimentary conference passes and licenses” to Co-op members. How does one go about getting them? The Co-op will explore the possibility of sharing Coop passes with non-city active Co-op members next year.
• Linda Coon was called upon to briefly talk about the “Address Quality Control Progress Report dated April 17, 2007”. It sounds like Linda has a tight reign on identifying and correcting duplications and mismatched address records. Keep up the great work!

Bryn’s first demonstration showed the function and code for the ArcMap template. The geodatabase editors (6 to 8 employees) use the customized template to add water infrastructure information to the database. The template comes preloaded with all the required layers and some tools for navigation and attribute population.

Her second demonstration showed some new tools that have been added to the eMap site http://twgis/emap (Intranet only), which was previously shown to the Co-op in September 2006.

It’s obvious that having custom templates and tools, makes it easier to complete any task big or small.