There was an excellent session on the Future of GIS yesterday at the APA meeting in Las Vegas. Speakers included Michael Flaxman from MIT, Richard Klosterman of What If? and Steven French from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Steven French pointed to the interactive and collaborative Web-based platforms that will increasingly involve citizens in planning decisions. He expressed some concerns about GIS professionals that are bifurcating into IT staffs, fearing that the focus on building applications would degrade the amount of analysis taking place. He also promoted open source software as a means to spread the technology far beyond core GIS markets.
Michael Flaxman also placed a focus on web-based systems for collaboration, but said it’s very hard to create urban information systems because of the need for transparency and substantive public involvement. As a former industry manager at ESRI who worked on early iterations of Model Builder, he expressed a wish for a means to incorporate social values into analysis. Flaxman discussed the idea of Sociotechnical Process Design that facilitates public involvement in real time, for meaningful and democratic decisions. Flaxman expressed some concern that the ubiquity of free available data through Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth might make it difficult to justify a community’s purchase of authoritative data.
Richard Klosterman spoke largely of planning support systems that adapt general-purpose GIS to customized tools that planners need. He suggested that desktop GIS has now reached the point where it can achieve any task that the planner is interested in, and said the platform will continue to grow to help planners. While there may be some interest in training planners how to program their own custom tools, the accessibility of componentized software can now address customization without having to learn computer coding.
Overall, the participants were very optimistic about the future of GIS for planners. The tools and technology for the planner will need to maintain a strong level of trusted source credibility and well-maintained standards in order to continue to play a role in the highly political planning process.
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Great article!
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