ESRI International User Conference
San Diego, CA
July 13, 2009
[Click here to view the PDF version of this speech]
Jack Dangermond, thanks very, very much. It is an honor to be here with all of you and it's a privilege to receive this very kind award on behalf of all of the people who work for the State of Maryland in this important field,… unlocking the potential of GIS.
It's also great to be with all of you in this hall. My goodness. What a tremendous gathering of people who believe in the progressive power of GIS, of geography.
There are very few people on this earth who have worked as tirelessly or as successfully as has Jack Dangermond to harness this power for the benefit of all of us. It's really been an honor to be able to partner with him in the urgent cause of progress in the State of Maryland. And, Jack, it's an honor to have come to be able to call you my friend. You're a terrific human being with a terrific vision.
The size, scope and enthusiasm of this assembled crowd affirms a belief, for me anyway, that in a world which is growing, as one writer puts it, “hotter, flatter, and more crowded,” GIS is more than a revolutionary technology. It is more than an analytical tool for making our government work. It's more than a new tool for implementing public policy. It just might be the lynchpin of a powerful new movement.
What do I mean by that? In his recent commencement speech at the University of Portland, Paul Hawken suggested to graduates, and I quote, “Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, … No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection.”
I personally believe that this movement also understands that urgent progress -- the sort of progress that our world needs today -- depends on a strengthening of our connections to one another. It depends on a stronger and clearer connection between our hopes and our responsibilities; a stronger and more affirming connection between the actions of this generation and the lives of the next generation.
Those of us who believe in the progressive power of GIS believe that in using The Map -- in using Smart Maps -- to strengthen our connections to one another, we have the potential to change the course of a city’s history, a country’s history – perhaps even our planet’s history – parcel-by-parcel, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, and most importantly, neighbor-by-neighbor.
That's been our hope, that's been our belief, and that's also been our experience in the State of Maryland.
With me today is our StateStat director, Beth Blauer. We'd like to share with you just a few examples from CitiStat, BayStat, StateStat, and RecoveryStat. As we do, I'd like you to consider, an important question which I'm sure that any of you working in government have been asked by your citizens, and it is this: Why is it that in the course -- and usually in the beginning -- of any government demonstration of GIS capability, one citizen in the crowd will inevitably give voice to the thoughts of many, by asking the question: “Can you show me my house?”
“Can you show me my house?” We'll come back to that.
Connections, Geography, & Progress in Maryland
The principles and strategies underpinning our StateStat model in Maryland – setting goals, measuring our progress, broadly sharing information rather than hording it – are, at their essence all about connections.
These same ideas were the ideas that inspired Bill Bratten and Jack Maple in the mid '90s in New York City to create ComStat to dramatically reduce crime, improve public safety and give New York, the Big Apple, a better future. Connecting police and crime deterrent assets to where the crime was actually happening.
And that process, that method, is what inspired us in the city of Baltimore to borrow those ComStat tenets to create CitiStat. Not just to manage policing, but to manage everything throughout our city government.
It's about timely, accurate information shared by all. It's about the rapid deployment of resources. It's about effective tactics and strategies, and the relentless follow-up and discussion and dialogue that allows you to drive progress and get the graphs moving in the right direction.
And, of course, it’s about The Map. Smart Maps. GIS is the central managing tool of all of this. A crime map, for example, doesn't know -- or care, frankly -- whether a neighborhood is black or white, whether a neighborhood is rich or poor. It tells us where the crime is happening and where we should, therefore, deploy our resources in order to suppress crime and make our city a safer place.
In the maps behind me, these red areas represented the deadliest areas and the most dangerous areas in the City of Baltimore. By mapping, by targeting resources to the most crime-challenged area, block by block, street by street, we were able to chip away every single year. Thanks to courageous police officers and neighbors, we were able to achieve over a relatively short period of time, a 40 percent reduction in violent crime.
The Map also helps us connect what we already know to what we hope to achieve. The Map shows us how to deploy our resources to attack our problems, The Map connects our actions to our goals. Show me my house.
At the state level, we focus on the inter-related challenges of security, sustainability, and the skills, the talents, and the health of our people: our workforce. We're using The Map -- we're using Smart Maps -- in the same ways to drive our progress, beginning with public safety and homicide reductions. Last year was our second biggest reduction since 1985. Mid year we're at a 10 percent reduction. Always striving to make the graphs move in the right, lifesaving direction.
And on a more basic, less life-and-death level, in any state in America, no one ever likes waiting in line to have their license renewed at their Motor Vehicle Administration, do they? So in Maryland we've been using StateStat and Smart Maps to help guide us and actually decrease wait times, cutting them in half, from an average of 61 minutes in July of 2007 to 30 minutes in April of 2009.
In this era of air pollution and high gas prices, on this other map, you can see how we're mapping efforts to increase transit ridership, which is a big important goal for our Administration. And the graph behind me represents another one of those graphs that are moving in the right direction of increasing transit ridership.
Let me talk a little bit about GreenPrint, which you can see here. It is part of our Maryland iMap, which ESRI built for us and with us. It is a first-of-its-kind map of every plot and every parcel in our State, with every parcel receiving an ecological score for the purposes of land conservation.
As part of GreenPrint, any Marylander can enter their own address and see the GreenPrint such as it exists today -- protected areas and unprotected areas, in their own neighborhood, and in their own county.
So as you can see, we're using maps to tell us what we should do together in terms of protecting ecologically essential woodlands and wetlands, rather than telling us what we should not do.
Through what we call BayStat, we use the map and apply performance measurement to our efforts to reduce the pollution: the nitrogen, the sediment, the phosphorous, the storm water run-off that are threatening to choke the very life out of that national treasure, the Chesapeake Bay.
You can click on any of the tributary basins and see whether we're making progress and hitting our remediation goals for activities like the planting of cover crops, or tree planting, or upgrades to our sewage treatment plants.
Recovery Website Demonstration
But what about our connections with our Federal Government?
When President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, with its $4 billion in reinvestment and recovery funds for the State of Maryland, it was important for us to make sure that we invest these public resources at this critical time and that we do so efficiently, that we do so quickly and that we do so with a return on investment in all the places that matter. Show me my house.
The Recovery website we set up with ESRI's assistance allows any citizen, anywhere in our State, to enter his or her address on The Map and see what projects are going on near them, around them, in their own town, in their own county. And the Recovery website allows us to see what's going on and where that money is being invested.
This is our Recovery website. We tried to make sure that our site flows from the Federal Recovery website, so we break the funding into the seven categories. You can see here up on the left that we have tabs which lead to two GIS maps which are part of our iMap, again that ERSI helped us build. One is an overview and one is a more detailed map.
Here first on the overview map we display the overall statewide breakdown of the Recovery and Reinvestment funding categories; health care, education, transportation, et cetera. We also allow citizens to click on their county to retrieve local information, to see how these dollars are coming to their own county - and in what amounts and for what purposes.
So, Beth, let's click on Prince George's County. As you can see, Prince George's County is receiving $319.9 million in stimulus funds. And, again, you see the breakdowns: health, education, transportation, housing, the environment.
If we click on the individual slices of that investment pie chart, we learn that of these investments, $117 million is being targeted toward protecting educational achievement this year in Prince George's County. Something very critical to us – the talents, the skills, the education of our people – because Maryland was named by Education Week Magazine this year as having the number one public school system in America. That was not inevitable, it wasn't by chance, it was by choice. And we choose to protect that achievement.
This more detailed map provides users greater interactivity and insight into Maryland's spending of Recovery and Reinvestment funds. The first screen allows the user to view overall investments by funding type.
We also allow Marylanders to input their own address. For the sake of this demonstration we have put in the address of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg.
Now, having punched in that address on Quince Orchard Road, you can see the various Recovery and Reinvestment projects around and near this particular address. From your location, you can then scroll down further into the map to illustrate the local impact of the Recovery. Here, for example, we can see not only Montgomery County's overall Recovery distribution, but any citizen can see the different funding areas and details of special projects within those categories.
By clicking on “show individual projects,” any citizen can see each project in their own neighborhood.
And what's more, they can direct questions back to their own government from the particular project about which they may have a specific concern or question.
The Map also helps us analyze the nature of our problems and the locations of our greatest opportunities for progress. So, take, for example, the pressing national issue of home foreclosures and their impact on housing values. The challenge of home foreclosures, this tsunami, if you will, is really attacking one of the basic goals of our entire enterprise, which is to strengthen and grow the ranks of an upwardly mobile middleclass in the State of Maryland.
So what we have been able to do, with ESRI's help, is to look at not only where the foreclosures are happening, but also to be able to determine how this wave of foreclosures is affecting housing values throughout our State. And that then informs us where we should deploy limited resources that we have for nonprofit housing counselors, those folks that moms and dads in their desperation reach out to, as they look for ways to try to keep a roof over their family's head.
This map shows us our two biggest metro areas, the Baltimore metro area and the Washington metro area. And it helps us deploy those foreclosure prevention mortgage rescue assets.
In this next map, we see the educational attainment of our citizens mapped across Maryland. Educational attainment. Connections.
And related and connected to that, of course, is unemployment, right? So while Maryland's unemployment rate is 7.2 percent (significantly better than the national rate of 9.4 percent,) there are lots of families throughout our State that are hurting and this map shows us where they live and where the need for employment is greatest.
And for our transit planning, it's important for us to know where car ownership is at its highest in Maryland and also where it is at its lowest. If you click onto the need tab here, we see where more parents are likely to depend on public transportation to get to work. Why? Because they don't own cars. And certainly it's all about connections.
Conclusion
I’d like to conclude with the question I posed at the outset: Why is it that virtually any government demonstration of GIS capability invariably prompts a citizen to ask "can you show me my house?”
Is it to understand what is happening around me? Is it to know that I matter to my neighbors? Is it to know that I matter to my government? Is it to know that my government works and therefore matters to me?
Or is it, perhaps, about a deeper yearning for connection. An innate human instinct to belong, and to better understand the bonds that connect us to the forces and to the people around us. The people that we share this planet with, whose children, along with ours, will inherit this planet. It's all about connection.
A connection to a higher truth; a truth that builds trust and community, a truth that proclaims the dignity of every individual. A truth that affirms our own responsibility to advance the common good. A truth that affirms that sense in our soul that there is a unity to spirit and to matter and that what we do in our own lifetimes does matter,…
… And God wants every partial victory.
Show me my house.
Thanks very much.
[Click here to view the PDF version of this speech]
