MarinMap represents a consortium of agencies that have joined together to build and use a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for their day-to-day operations. The Internet-accessible GIS, provides a nice public service as well as an easily-accessible tool for sharing across agencies.
The stated goals of the organization are to:
- Provide improved customer service to customers seeking geographically based information
- Reduce the cost of service to taxpayers and ratepayers
- Improve agency business processes
- Provide the opportunity for better decision-making
- Encourage cooperation among public agencies, eliminate redundancies, improve efficiency and minimize conflicts
The consortium has declared this year’s efforts as the Year of the Planner. They plan to prioritize planning applications by inserting new spatial data layers that serve local planning department operations, and to design web browser-based GIS interface for viewing planning data. There’s also a move to draft a countywide GIS-based storm water system to support system maintenance and hydrologic modeling.
This county-level collaboration is an important example of what can be accomplished through a geospatial consortium. The common goals, and one common budget, serve to raise the quality and amount of geospatial data for the benefit of all. The work as a consortium also proves beneficial when reacting to any local emergency that needs the kind of coordination that only broad-level geographic data can provide.
