June 4, 2002

 

Dear WAGIC Colleague,

 

Thanks to all of you who attended and participated in April's theme-based meeting on current GIS activities in the Federal Government.  I would especially like to thank the presenters, Wendy Hawley of the Seattle Office of the U.S. Census and Tracy Fuller from the USGS’s Boise Office.  Both of you did a excellent job!

 

This month's WAGIC meeting, scheduled for June 20^th, will focus on the use of GIS in Secondary Education.  We’ve put together another great program. Debra Holmes will talk about how the Central Valley School District in Spokane, Washington is using GIS to facilitate and optimize school bus routing within their district.  Next, the National Director of Nature Mapping Program, Karen M. Dvornich, will discuss how GIS is used in research at Nature Mapping Schools. Finally, Peter Hayes, the Ecological Studies Coordinator at Lakeside Middle School in Seattle, Washington, will wrap up the theme-based portion of our meeting with his presentation entitled “GIS in Secondary Education; Promise, Progress, and Peril."

 

During our business portion of the meeting, Jeff Holm will update you on the Landsat 7 Consortium’s target delivery dates for statewide Landsat 7 coverage and the Consortium’s recent all-day remote sensing training workshop.  Next Jeff will discuss the next meeting of the Information Services Board (ISB) Geographic Information Technology subcommittee and the status of its efforts to promote a state agency-led joint budget request for a statewide ortho-photography project.  And finally, the last item on the business portion of our agenda will be the announcement of the new WAGIC chair.  To facilitate the transition to the new chair we have extended the time we normally allot to various sites during closing site roundtable to provide you the opportunity to comment on what you liked about WAGIC meetings and also on what things you would like the new Chair to improve upon.

 

As my time as Chair of WAGIC officially comes to an end with this meeting, I would

like to say that it’s been a great experience. I’ve learned a lot, and I would like to

personally thank each of you for giving me this opportunity.  Also I would especially like to thank those forty plus individuals who over the last two years took the time and effort out of their own busy lives to enrich ours by doing presentations for

WAGIC.  All of you were great!  And you certainly played a key role in making everyone’s experience with WAGIC a rich one and in making our theme based meetings a success as well. Thanks again! 

 

If you have any questions or would like additional information about this meeting or WAGIC in general, please call either Jeff Holm at (360) 902-3447 or me at (509) 477-6344.

 

We look forward to seeing you at the next meeting.

 

Sincerely,

 

 

Ian Von Essen

WAGIC Chair