This year the Esri User Conference is, like every other conference, virtual. The bad news is I’ll miss out on soirée-ing with the worlds greatest customers. The good news is so many more people can participate now because it’s all online, and it’s free to customers and students.
Here is a rundown of the presentations that I’ll be a part of, so you’ll know to steer clear of them.
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No doubt my favorite session every year is the demopalooza I get to play at with my friend and colleague Ken Field. It’s always great fun whipping through a dozen or so how-tos, as a thinly veiled excuse for Ken and I to insult each other. This year is no different. We each blaze through four demos, then wrap with a lightning fast round of two one-minute demos each.
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In this session I team up with the incomparable Andy Skinner. Andy’s spent decades making maps for Donnelley, Rand McNally and National Geographic. And since no good deed goes unpunished, he now find himself occasionally saddled with me, in the form of this session about basemaps.
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This is another team-up with Ken, except that it’s actually fully his presentation and maps, and I’m just there to provide the occasional commentary since Ken is an Englishman talking about American election maps. Fall guy?
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Join Edie Punt, Ken Field (3/5 of the Cartography MOOC pals), and me as we team up once more to nerd out on maps, this time about how to use Styles in ArcGIS Pro. Edie will cover the important parts while Ken and I goof around with some demos. In this one I build the cross-stitch style from scratch.
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Visualization with Living Atlas
This is a continuation of the annual chats that Jennifer Bell and I have about how to make maps and stories that break hearts and steal minds. Or something like that. This year we are focused on content and apps that can be sourced from Living Atlas. We’ll do like 6 or 7 demos. Get ready to live.
So I’ll see you next week!
I sure will miss snacking with you at the YPN pool party, joining fellow Michigan map nerds at Joe’s Crab Shack, having beers at Tin Fish with any number of new folks I’d be lucky to meet, and awkwardly wandering the halls, map gallery, and expo between sessions not knowing what do do with myself.
But I’ll be around in a digital virtual bits-and-bytes form all week with video streaming Q&A stuff, loitering in the online map gallery, lurking in the virtual Mapping & Visualization expo island, and may even pop in for some chit chat between plenary sessions. My virtual self will still be plenty busy and fully present. I might even get a record amount of sleep this year (which shouldn’t be too hard, even with a three-day agenda rather than full week). See you then, friends!
Love, John