It is Friday evening and I am sitting in the Applications Prototype Lab (APL) at ESRI’s headquarters right now, approximately 80km west of the Pacific Ocean, 25km south of a roaring brush fire, a brief bike ride to the San Andreas fault, and a few minute walk to the apartment I am staying in on the good will of others.
I arrived in Redlands just over a week ago, late Thursday around 1:00am after a number of detours due to the Detla Airlines’ systems failure. I settled in the office that day and prepared materials for an all-day planning meeting the next about how we could best use my time here and prepare for our upcoming presentation in Rome. Some of the people who joined in the meeting included team members from this lab, individuals who have helped implement Enterprise GIS’s for various international projects and organizations, and some truly inspiring cartogrphers/app developers who's maps have already changed the world for the better (a good example would be their work mapping the Ebola epidemic with the WHO that helped to contain the disease by targeting resources).
During my two months in Redlands I am working with the Applications Prototype Lab and various professional services to develop apps to demo and share, create a presentation we will share in Rome in December, maps that will be hanging on display during the presentation period in Rome, and additional details about how we can help the Catholic community roll out a GIS hub, and build sustainable internal capacity in the Church and various diocese to leverage mapping for enormous good. We are not only interested in making maps, we are developing the data infrastructure to work with other organizations interested in Catholic mapping in a cohesive and cost-effective enterprise GIS system, and the organization structure to enable #movementbuildingwithmaps through partnership based initiatives and API platforms. I have a decent amount to do, but it is all enjoyable and I am continuing to learn an immense amount each day from my colleagues. Receiving a broad view of these specialized niches in GIS, data governance, and security with the team here who has laid the foundation for various multinational data infrastructures and GIS services is an invaluable experience.
Between May and July I had two months of almost constant travel, and this was my typical rough travel -- bus trips, couchsurfing, moving between relatively unknown places, people, and social strata on faith, a prayer, and intuition; all with a rapidly deteriorating computer (which has been replaced, not a moment too soon, thank God). During that time I forged partnerships and found where to get the data we needed to move forward -- enduring through that quite exhausting phase is now paying off in major ways. This week almost all of the people and organizations I had been running around to and building relationships and partnerships with for the Advocacy and Build Capacity and Inventory levels of the CCSDI have shared their data and our intern, Sasha, completed mapping the entire Western Hemisphere of diocese before I arrived. Sasha is working with the team here to finish up the rest of the world at the moment. We are making basemaps of things that have not been seen or re-examined geographically in hundreds of years, some never - for example, there was no map (that we know of) of Episcopal Conferences, which came into existence after Vatican II, until GoodLands finished ours over a month ago. In an almost fortuitous twist of fate, an Archdiocese backed out of a project at the last minute, which has ended up working for better. The timing is perfect to be here, we are working with pretty much every large Catholic data source out there and it’s coming together; any sooner and it would have been embarrassingly small amount to work with, and any later and with GoodLands limited capacity might have made this all too rushed by December.
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Preview, works in process |
Just this past week we worked with CARA's data to make maps showing the ratios of Catholic priests and deacons to Catholics across the United States at the resolution of diocese, measured standard deviations of sister density, and mapped which diocese had the most and least priests in formation in relation to the size of the Catholic population, to name just a few maps. We will attempt to join our maps with a recent Nation-Wide Green Infrastructure mapping project to identify how we relate to a comprehensive green infrastructure system – this map alone could potentially help thousands of Catholic communities across the United States plan for a greener future. I will spare you with the details of all the organizations GoodLands has been working with, but there have been very interesting things learned through this process – one being that lots of of global information about the Catholic Church from the Annuario Pontifico that is in digital from is managed and run by a very devout hobbyist, David Cheney. His entire site is dedicated to the Church and Pope Francis. He has been working on it for 20+ years. It is truly a labor of love and I really hope that our work can help him get the support to maintain and support his operations and perhaps move them to a more sustainable db.
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Molly Burhans
http://catholicgeo.org/
http://www.goodlandproject.org/
