Online Endeavors
There are five components to a proper GIS:HardwareSoftwareDataPeopleMethods (or procedures)Typically, good data is the most expensive part of the system and good people are the most critical piece.
That's from a piece I wrote elsewhere. I wanted to link to an explanation of what GIS is for an explanation of the name of the site in question that was at that time being put in the sidebar. It has since been moved to the Intro.
I wasn't finding anything satisfactory so I wrote my own because I have world class education in GIS. At the risk of sounding like an egomaniac, that's probably the best explanation of GIS in layman's terms on the planet.
I have a Certificate in Geographic Information Systems from UC-Riverside. That is the world's foremost GIS program because some -- probably most -- of the instructors in the program work full time at ESRI which is the company that makes the world's foremost GIS software.
ESRI is physically located nearby and as part of my GIS Summer School program they stuck us all in a van or two and drove down to San Diego so we could attend the GIS convention that summer. So even though GIS was born of Canadian politicians asking the impossible and people rising to the occasion instead of failing and sweeping it under the rug, Southern California is GIS central.
In addition to having world class education in GIS from an excellent program, I'm an educator with substantial experience explaining high level, complex subjects in an approachable, digestible fashion. This goes back to at least high school when I tutored high school students in college-level math for a year as a member of a college math honor society.
That was a huge growth experience because I was the only member willing to work with a girl working her butt off to earn the hell out of her Cs and Ds in Algebra. I knew her teacher couldn't teach because she did her student teaching stint in my math class the year before, so as long as this girl was willing to sit through yet another explanation, I was going to try to come up with one more way to try to say it that might work for her.
She was there every single tutoring session like clock work. I sometimes tried ten different explanations before it did anything for her.
I also homeschooled my two twice-exceptional sons and as part of that I got involved with The TAG Project, the oldest set of gifted support email lists on the planet. The gifted assessment, services and education community is extremely small, so I regularly spoke with some fairly big names in that industry for some years.
My involvement as Director of Community Life helped me attend a Beyond IQ conference where I met or saw speak even bigger names. Some of the industry insiders I spoke with recognized me from my online activities.
I originally began blogging because my emails to Tagmax had people emailing me and asking me if they could forward that to someone they knew, plus one of my best friends asked if she could publish one of my emails on her business website where she sold resources for this community. She prefaced that with telling me that most of the time when she found an email to Tagmax at all interesting and thought provoking, she got to the signature and it was mine.
So in this small world of gifted education and resources filled with highly intelligent and talented people, I stood out. So much so that shortly after volunteering to moderate Tagmax and only Tagmax, I was asked to join the board of directors and be lead moderator for the team of moderators for all of their lists, thus the spiffy title of Director of Community Life.
So all evidence suggests that in the gifted education community, I was someone explaining stuff better than other people, some of whom were professionals in gifted education in some capacity and/or published authors. I learned a lot of that ability to explain tough, dense topics well without watering it down -- or polished it, because there's a longer back story -- by raising and homeschooling my gifted, learning-disabled sons.
As a homeschooling parent, in compliance with California law, I was the teacher for a two-student multi-grade private school for seven years. My kids were below grade level in some subjects when we began and well above grade level in other subjects. It was my job to bridge that Grand Canyon effectively without inadvertently misleading them for simplicity's sake on any important details essential to the topic.
When I was in GIS school, I stood out there too, always having my hand up first on math questions, and I frequently explained things to my classmates. When someone commented on how well I explained things, his buddy said something like "She is a teacher. She homeschools."
While on Cyburbia, the oldest urban planning discussion forum on the planet, everyone there complained they couldn't explain urban planning or GIS to people they met in the course of doing their job and interacting with the public. They knew of no good explanations in layman's terms for either of these fields and I got positive reactions from professional planners when I would toss out suggestions like "It's like SimCity for the real world."
So that explanation in layman's terms is rooted both in knowing what I'm talking about and knowing how to make complex subjects approachable without watering them down. Firsthand experience speaking regularly for years with professionals informs me no one knew a good explanation in layman's terms though they spent years trying to come up with some means to effectively explain things to the public which was part of the job.
So when I wasn't readily seeing something that said what I wanted it to say about GIS, I wrote it myself knowing from years of experience a good explanation likely simply didn't exist and also knowing from years of experience I am unusually well-qualified to write such an explanation in terms of both knowing what GIS is and knowing how to explain things on the order of this complex topic where my Certificate in GIS is the equivalent of Master's level work though at the time there was no requirement that you have a bachelor's degree to apply to the program.
No one will ever read it. It's got 305 views currently and it's over a year old.
Based on having world class education in GIS, I'm clear that for any online projects, whether for-profit businesses or not-for-profit endeavors, data is like raw materials similar to gold and silver and you need to make sure it's really gold and not fool's gold.
I'm also sure the people running the thing are akin to the mental and social DNA for the project. The handful of people who play a central role in creating and running the project, such as business founders or lead moderators, powerfully shape the project in ways both profound and subtle.
So two details critical to the success of online projects are having the right people and getting the facts. Quality data is extremely hard to come by, especially for anything social because everybody lies and even when they don't intentionally deceive you, the norm for social stuff is the use of proxies which aren't reliable.
This post is background information because I intend to do write ups on several forums and it also was written so I can add a link to the About page to try to more clearly communicate what this project is about.
Please note that not all online forums are businesses. While the above framework still applies, it is not the case that online forums are automatically a subset of online businesses.