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Besides being a nice informal social and educational opportunity, our spring Geo-Dinner meeting this year gave our guests the opportunity to preview the facilities, food and services of the Horizon Convention Center in Muncie, as well as get a preview of Ball State Universities GIS Education capabilities. In case you didn't already know, The Horizon Center and Ball State will be the site for IGIC's 2011 & 2013 Annual GIS Conferences. IGIC's Conference Committee spends quite a bit of time evaluating and selecting our conference sites and their amenities, and last night's event surely reinforced our choice of Muncie! After dinner presentations were made by Jim Sparks, State of Indiana's GIO, and Angela Gibson, Ball State University Libraries GIS Specialist.

Angela Gibson's presentation was an eye-opener for me. Ball State Muncie with 20,000 students is about half the size of Purdue West Lafayette & IU Bloomington, but their adoption and availability of geospatial technology and education opportunities is second-to-none. In addition to major GIS programs in the Universities Geography Department and College of Architecture and Planning, the Universities Bracken Library provides GIS support to 19 other Departments/Colleges.

Angela explained that her boss, the Dean of the University Library, loves maps and is a huge advocate for GIS, and is responsible for providing access to GIS software and data on over 140 computers in Bracken Library for students use.

Angela is also a member of IGIC's Conference Committee, and she will be coordinating the hands-on workshops for our upcoming conferences that will utilize the Universities GIS lab and library facilities.

Jim Sparks talked about two very important topics concerning GIS in Indiana - data sharing and broadband mapping.

IndianaMap Data Sharing Initiative: Jim started out his presentation by talking about the 2007 Indiana Code that created his position (IC 4-23-7.3) and some of his legislated duties that include: Facilitating GIS data cooperation between units of the federal, state, and local governments; Integrating GIS data and framework data into a statewide base map; and providing public access to this GIS data. Jim also spoke about new Obama administration Open Government directives designed to provide more access to public information to help drive innovation and support accountability and transparency; and that we (the Indiana GIS community) have been doing this for more than 10 years, and should be proud of our efforts and a model for other states.

Currently, 85 of 92 Indiana Counties have agreed to share four key data layers (parcels, address points, road centerlines, and boundaries), and approximately 65 of those county datasets are available for viewing and FREE download from the IndianaMap. These data currently consist of over 2 million individual parcels and address points, almost half a million road centerline segments, and over 3,000 jurisdictional boundaries. Jim pointed out that this number will continue to increase each month as more county data is harvested and updated, and he sincerely thanked everyone for helping make this project such a success for the people of Indiana.

Indiana's Broadband Mapping Initiative: Mapping of Indiana's Broadband infrastructure is currently underway. This is thanks to the Indiana State Legislature passing a bill in 2009 to create a statewide GIS map of broadband availability (IC 5-28-33-3), and Federal ARRA funds (grants) becoming available in 2009 for states to fund this effort. Jim described why this is important to Indiana by quoting the Chairman of the FCC has stated “We believe that broadband is a critical infrastructure challenge of our generation. It is to us what railroads, electricity, highways, and telephones were to previous generations”, and that "a 10% increase in broadband availability means a 1.2 to 1.5 point increase in GDP.", and that is a big number! Jim described challenges for Indiana that include low broadband adoption rates of up to 70% in rural, low income, minorities, and elderly communities, and that about 10% of the nation's population doesn't even have access to broadband.

To meet National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) requirements, Indiana is mapping broadband availability by census blocks, including information of the wired service provider(s), technology used, advertised speed (up and downstream), as well as creating GIS files to depict availability of wireless broadband.

The (preliminary) map above is an example of one of the new GIS broadband map layers created for Indiana (a map that never existed before). Phase 1 of the mapping will be completed and delivered to the NTIA for review by the end of this month. Phase 1 consist of broadband maps based on data “in-hand” for the state. Phase 2 is already starting, and will immediately begin to improve the map with data requested from the service providers. In parallel to these efforts, ongoing quality control to verify the maps using federal (FCC) sources and crowd sourced (citizen address point level) survey information will be integrated into the process.

In summary, Jim stated that the initial results of this ongoing mapping effort should start to become available for publication on the IndianaMap by early this Summer.

Copies of these presentations are available here on the IGIC web site.