This free presentation is meant for everyone, to help get us all up to speed with geo-spatial data and its civic uses. Hope you'll join us!
Lasers in the Sky: An Introduction to Civic Uses of Geographic Data for Burlington’s General Public
Who: Code for BTV & Vermont Center for Geographic Information
What: Free Geographic Tech Talk for Burlington's General Public
When: Friday, September 29, 6pm
Where: At Big Heavy World, inside the SEABA Center at 404 Pine Street, Burlington (Map: https://goo.gl/maps/qksaxeaB7tA2 )
Drones, helicopters, and planes are shooting lasers at the earth. Why? Satellites are staring down at us from space all day, and all night. What do they see, and how is it being used? Friends and neighbors are working for the city using their phones and tablets with GPS devices to collect all sorts of details about the city around you. What does the city use it for? Does it affect your taxes or how long a fire truck takes to reach your house? Are your photo posts on Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram helping your community, or just changing the ads you see in your web browsing? If we take the lasers, the satellites, and the phone GPS data, and mash it together onto a map, what things can we see and do?
Are you just plain curious about place-based information (i.e., geo-spatial data)?
Please join Code for BTV, and the Vermont Center for Geographic Information, at 6pm on September 29th, for this free public discussion on what geographic data systems are, how they are used around you every day, and why it might matter to you. The event is being held at Code for BTV’s home base, Big Heavy World inside the SEABA Center at 404 Pine Street in Burlington. RSVP for the event at https://www.meetup.com/CodeForBTV/ The venue is handicapped accessible.
This will be both a presentation, and a free form discussion on the topic of geographic data and the systems involved in collecting, managing, and using it. It’s all geared toward the general public that knows absolutely nothing about geographic data. The presentations will teach from a high level general perspective how these systems work, and then show you the myriad of ways that they are used to help you, record you, influence you, and provide you with world understanding that would be otherwise unattainable. The presentations will be fun, lightweight, and visually exciting.
About Code for BTV: Code for BTV is an official Code for America Brigade that facilitates sustainable collaborations on civic software and open data projects between coders, designers, and organizations (both governmental and non-governmental) in the greater Burlington, Vermont area. Code for BTV hosts events for civic hackers to come together and work on building and reusing civic apps and support open data initiatives. Code for BTV is supported in part by The Office of the Vice President for Research at UVM and administrated by Big Heavy World. http://wwwCodeforBTV.org
About VCGI: The Vermont Center for Geographic Information, a division of the Agency of Commerce and Community Development (VCGI), provides strategic governance and delivers high quality geospatial data, services, solutions, infrastructure and expertise that helps enable legislation. http://vcgi.vermont.gov/