NWGIS Boise

October 17 - 21, 2011

Innovate ♦ Design ♦ Collaborate

Boise is proud to host the 26th Annual Northwest GIS Users Group Conference for the very first time. Idaho's state capital and largest city, Boise, is home to a thriving GIS community eager to share our hospitality and our city with you.

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Learn More. Spend Less.

We have worked hard to reduce your costs. Boise is ideally located in the Pacific Northwest for easy travel to and from the conference. The Grove Hotel is providing affordable lodging right next door to the conference in the heart of Boise's vibrant downtown.

The Northwest GIS User Conference continues its history of providing affordable learning opportunities, previews of upcoming GIS technology, and opportunities to share with GIS professionals from across the Northwest.

Conference Highlights

The 26th annual Northwest GIS User Conference offers a diverse range of pre-conference training, from introductory to developer level courses. Technical sessions and hands-on tutorials will be offered during the conference at no extra cost.

Our keynote speakers will provide forward-thinking perspectives applicable to the GIS profession. ESRI will give you a look at their current and upcoming products. The user presentations and posters offer an opportunity for you to share your work and to learn from your colleagues from across the Northwest. Visit with local and national companies to find GIS solutions that can help meet your GIS needs. Side meetings will give you an opportunity to visit with and share ideas with other GIS professionals.

Conference Participants

Innovate

The rise of the mobile web has transformed GIS from back office software to a key technology changing how we live, work and play. As geographic innovation revolutionizes the way everyone interacts, we as GIS professionals must evolve to support and guide the millions of individuals using and creating spatial data.

The challenge for GIS Professionals has moved from building proprietary, enterprise spatial databases to sharing and consuming diverse sources of spatial data. In our Wednesday keynote address, Don Cooke, Community Maps Evangelist at ESRI, will discuss solutions developed by industry leaders at Google, TomTom, Garmin, ESRI and the Open Street Map Consortium for distributed volunteer mapping and spatial data.

Design

A key skill of the geographic professional is conveying information in graphic form. While traditional map-making remains a core component of modern GIS, Web-based visualizations have become increasingly more important. In a new addition to our annual poster contest, conference attendees will have the opportunity to compete in two Web application categories. One award will be presented for web cartography and another for innovative design.

This year we will also be adding special student categories to our poster contest.

Collaborate

The Northwest GIS User Conference provides something no other conference does: the opportunity to meet and visit with your fellow GIS professionals from across the Pacific Northwest. In addition to the user presentations, you will have plenty of opportunities to meet with your colleagues in both formal and informal settings.

Are you ready to share, but not sure you're ready to give a full user presentation? New this year is an exciting Ignite-format session allowing you to dip your toes in the water with a quick 5 minute presentation of 20 slides.

 Fall for Boise

Mountains and museums. Restaurants and rivers. Festivals and fresh air. Boise is a surprising blend of urban and outdoors -- big enough to have all the comforts of a big city, yet small enough to make it easy to enjoy it all.

Check out our outdoor activities, arts scene or our city's museum pass program. Learn about our growing wine region or thriving dining scene. Or like us, simply Fall for Boise, and be part of a celebration of the city's culture and community which will run throughout the NWGIS Conference.

Visit our Interactive Map of Local Business Partners to browse special offers for conference attendees. These include food discounts, drink specials and even special rates for a round of golf. Most of the businesses offering conference specials are within easy walking distance of Boise Centre on the Grove.

Arriving In the City of Trees

Boise is easily accessible via air or ground. By air, fly direct from Denver, Lewiston, Los Angeles, Portland, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Spokane and Sun Valley. A seven percent promotional discount has been arranged with Horizon airlines to reduce your travel costs. We will send you the promotional code with your registration confirmation. Interstate 84 and Idaho Route 55 place Boise within a day's drive of cities within the Pacific Northwest. Once you've arrived, transportation is easy on foot, bicycle or car in Boise's downtown. The Grove Hotel offers free transportation to and from the airport.

Boise Centre on the Grove

NWGIS 2011 will occupy the largest convention facility in Idaho, The Boise Centre, located in the heart of beautiful downtown. When not in session, enjoy Boise's diverse cuisine from Basque pub food on one block, Thai spring rolls on the next, wood-fired pizza with regional beer at the place around the corner and many other choices. At night, enjoy an active local music scene featuring live entertainment. Home to a distillery and several breweries, you can find a perfectly made cocktail or small-batch brews in spots across the city. Discounts will be available to conference attendees from a variety of local restaurants.

Everything you need is within walking distance.

Stay & Play Downtown

After the sessions end, you don't have to leave. NWGIS has arranged discounted rates at The Grove Hotel, just across the fountain from the conference meeting rooms. Perched above the Qwest Arena, home to the Idaho Steelheads, Boise Burn and Idaho Stampede, rates are $99 for corporate and $77 for government attendees.

Events will be planned into the evening including an around town geocache, mountain biking in the foothills, special interest happy hour meetups and a Thursday night outdoor block party on Boise's historic Basque Block.

Basque Photo

Be Part of NWGIS 2011

We want your help. To stay informed and help shape NWGIS 2011, follow us via twitter, rss, linkedin, facebook or visit this website frequently.

 

News

  • Next Northwest GIS User Conference September 30 - October 4, 2012 - Portland, Oregon

    Hello all and Happy Holidays!

    The NW GIS Users Group is active planning the next conference. Here's the news& we're joining forces with URISA and their GIS-Pro 2012 50th Anniversary Conference in Portland, OR, Sept. 30-Oct. 4, 2012. Classes are on Sept. 30 - Oct. 1 and the conference follows.

    This should be an outstanding conference for a number of reasons and not just the fact that we've joined forces. Paramount is the fact that this will be a crossing of cultures: Management & Technology. Traditionally, URISA is more of a management focus and NWUG is more of a technical group. The combination will offer you a lot of outstanding choices!

    We have three representatives from the NWUG on the planning committee and we're working for you. For instance, our typical registration fees and business partner fees have been somewhat less than theirs. We're negotiating these prices to help you get the biggest bang for your buck!

    We'll have more information for you as we approach the conference date, but for now, mark these dates on your calendar!

    Also, please be thinking about paper presentations or short 1-2 hour workshops. The Call For Papers should be sent out the first part of the year AND there is an EARLY DEADLINE! (February!) Be thinking now about your presentations.

    Summary:

    • Sept. 30 - Oct. 4, 2012 - put it on your calendar and in your budget
    • Put together ideas for presentations (Feb. deadline)
    • Keep an eye out for more announcements

    Watch for us at http://nwgis.org. We hope to see you there. Follow us on twitter, facebook and LinkedIn.

     

  • Creating the 2011 NWGIS Conference Attendees Map

    2011 NWGIS Conference Attendees Map: The map is interactive, zoom in/out, click on the pins to get details on the attendees to the conference.  

    To recreate this map (or your own simple map)

    Step 1: scroll to the bottom of the community list and click on the small orange ‘csv’ button – save the file ”community.csv” to your desktop

    Step 2: start ArcGIS Explorer Online: http://explorer.arcgis.com  and start a New Map

    Step 3: Click on the Add Content button (button with + sign), click on “import” and select CSV

    Step 4: Browse to the ‘community.csv’ file you just saved, click next and then import

    You know have a map with all the currently registered attendees to the 2011 NWGIS conference.

    If you want to go further and symbolize by state for example, expand the layer details ( click on > on the left side of the map) and start playing with the “Display Configuration” (to control symbology – Unique value by State for example) and/or “Pop ups Configuration” (to change the content of the pop-ups when you click on a symbol – no need to show “FID” for example).

    To embed the map in a website or to share it via social media venues (facebook, twitter), you will have to save the map first and for that you will need to log in to your ArcGIS Online account (or create a login if you don’t have one).

  • Specials from Boise businesses for conference attendees

    Visit our Interactive Map of Local Business Partners to browse special offers for conference attendees. These include food discounts, drink specials and even special rates for a round of golf. Most of the businesses offering conference specials are within easy walking distance of Boise Centre on the Grove.

      

    This Web map was created using the ArcGIS Server JavaScript API. To view the code used to create this Web map follow the Interactive Map of Local Business Partners link and :

    - In Firefox or Chrome right click anywhere on the map page and select View Page Source.

    - In Internet Explorer right click on the page outside the main map window and select View Source.