Hi, I'm Marty Webb. I'm the CEO of Tech Soup, and I have the privilege and pleasure of being here today at Esri's amazing campus with Jack Dangermond. Thank you. We've been having a wonderful conversation so far this morning all about the possibilities of GIS and the potential for nonprofit organizations to use it to partner with one another and with others. And I just wonder if you can start just by talking a little bit about your corporate interest in nonprofits and where you see your mission intersecting and your work intersecting with some of the work that civil society organizations.
Well, first, you know, geography is the science of our world. I mean, everything starts with that actually. That everything that everybody cares about that is like climate, climate change, people, access to knowledge, I mean actually everything, physical geography, economic geography, social geography, it's all geography. So the way I look at the world is that it's everything. And GIS is a way to sort of abstract everything, everything that people care about, everything we know into a digital form and make it available for applications. And NGOs, our nonprofit segment of our world, is a powerful part of our world, so how can we make everything available to every NGO? Okay, that's very conceptual, Marty says so, yeah, okay, sorry about that, let's drill down to make it more real. If maps are a language which they are and geography is the content behind that language and geography is now becoming all digital. How do NGOs truly participate in a digital world?
Where the whole world is becoming digital? Well, they've got to be equipped to be able just like with spreadsheets to look at tables. They've got to be equipped with digital maps to be able to make spatial decisions and also participate with all the other digital organizations that are using geographic information to make decisions.
And how do you see organizations? I mean there are both sides of it, right? There's the data that they have.
It's everything actually. I just want to keep, sorry to be obnoxious about this, but geography is actually a frame or a lens of everything. So NGOs work with their little part of everything of their own data sets, their own people, the things that they care about, the issues that they're trying to address. And geography again, and GIS is a set of tools that manipulate geography, make maps, do analytics, is the language that NGOs should be empowered with. And I think as we talked about this morning, uh, you know, Ralph Nader was sort of one of the first people that turned me on to it. He simply said, you know, Jack, you're doing marvelous work with all your cities and your counties and the states and the agencies and businesses. But you know, you've forgot somebody. You forgot everybody else that are really the players in citizen organizations, in community organizations, in conservation organizations, in health organizations that represent, you know, most of the action that happens in the world. He says, why don't you open up your tools so it's freely available for that informal segment of the world to be able to participate? And it was kind of like this digital divide first idea. This was, you know, dozens of years ago.
Yeah. So why not equip everybody with the same tools? That was his basic advocation.
Yeah. So I think that's, you know, equipping them for the tools is part of it, right? But then there's also how do we let them build on the solutions of others. And equip them with solutions. So we're not just giving them the raw tools. And one of the things you were talking a lot about was your ecosystem of partners and the data that underlies that and is available so that you can get at it. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you see people actually getting the support they need to work with those tools so that it's a meaningful experience for them and it propels them forward in their missions.
Well, I thought what you were going to ask is what about the data?
Okay. So, what about the data?
What about the data? Look, our users, and we have millions of them actually around the world in almost every field, they create all kinds of data. They could create all these layers. And during the 90s, you'll remember, or even during the 80s, there was always this concept of open data. And open data was kind of interesting, but what does an NGO do with open data? My customers create most of the geographic information in the world; they digitize it, in other words, and whether they're coming with imagery from satellites or from aircraft or whether they're collecting census data, statistical data, or whether they're building geology maps or soil maps or environmental maps or biodiversity maps or street maps, they manage with their digital environments everything, and the data should be available openly.
Yeah. So one of the things that, you know, we were talking about earlier and part of our organizational ambition is this idea that we're able to provide CTO-like guidance and support to organizations. And I think when we think about services like that, the key is how do we make those services useful and available to small organizations, how do we set up communities of purpose, you know, that are supporting these domain expertise. And I think that's so much of what you've done at a corporate level. In your different verticals, how do you see that playing out? Do you see that playing out in similar ways for nonprofit organizations?
Yeah. I mean, one of the programs that we have here is nonprofit organizations. And I've, listen, I'm so appreciative of you and your organization because you're really facilitating the delivery of our technology to that community. And what does it mean really? It means, okay, the informal and the nonprofit communities can be enriched by these tools and people can make their own maps, they can do their own analytics and they can be empowered that way. But the other dimension that excites me is that all of our customers can make their data and their services available to that community to have a very powerful civic engagement, you know, society as a total. And that was one of Ralph's whole points is don't set up a digital divide because so much of what happens in the world is driven by normal people, citizens and organizations that self-organize. And that's what I really want to accomplish with you. And we've had a few years of good success just making our software available to the communities that you serve. And I really want to get more strategic and more engaged so that all of these people who are building digital geography, or what sometimes I call the nervous system of the world, are embracing and interconnecting with the whole nonprofit world so that they become actors in the evolution of everything.
Yeah. And I think part of what we want, we're eager for that kind of partnership. And, you know, part of what we want to be able to provide is how do we help aggregate the needs of these organizations in ways that can help your partners, help you, help others in this ecosystem be able to provide services and support. You know, where do we look for together? There's opportunities for collaboration that cross sectors to make our cities work better.
Yeah. I mean, you look at any given city, it has issues: traffic, pollution, homelessness, social problems, and how does the city get better? I mean, you can have a mayor who has great vision, but how do you deliver it? It's got to be in collaboration with the citizens that are actually there. Getting everybody to be a participant in making the city better, I think, is the great solution that digitizing everything promises to go with. I don't know, Marty. I'm excited with this idea that we can take the sort of halves and have-nots of the digital world and bring them together so that they're collaborating with common information systems, helping each other, envisioning a better future and creating a better future.
Yeah, I'm excited by that. I'm also just excited by the idea as you went through and were describing today and drawing up on the whiteboard, you know, the idea that you have this core product that you're very invested in maintaining, improving, making available to all your users. But then there are these solutions and services that are required to help people use them. And what role can we play actually in helping have a catalog of solutions that are ready to go to support organizations that may not even think that that's what they need. You know, I was sharing before that, you know, we have organizations that do deliveries of something for their community. They're not thinking, 'Oh, I need the list of deliveries in a reasonable order.' They aren't thinking, 'I need routing software that works on top of mapping like this.' But you have a million solutions that do that.
There are, and there's a lot of different companies that build those solutions. And then there's also lots of organizations that are in the public sector, right, that have built those solutions. And just having a sort of a free library of being able to access one of those solutions and apply it to a particular problem set, it sounds kind of easy, but if somebody doesn't really understand how to apply a solution workflow to a particular technology like a GIS technology, it's hard.
Yeah. So, and this is, I mean, I would really like you to become more and more interested at Tech Soup and not just distributing our software but actually taking an active role with people that can help the NGOs apply it. That is what's pragmatic use. Right. That's what's going to turn the corner for these organizations. I mean, 91% of the organizations we serve have five or fewer employees. They don't have a GIS specialist sitting there. They're not sitting there thinking about mapping as a problem. But they are thinking about problems that involve space and time. You know, they are thinking about problems that involve delivering resources to people. I think what the role we can play in some of that is how do we articulate those problems so that we can understand that mapping and GIS can be a tool. I think the other thing that we can do, and it really is eye-opening for me, is to think about all the different ways now you can input data into a map. It's not like a set of coordinates and a location, right? It's that you can take a picture and get this rich data translated on a map. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how that technology has evolved and changed.
Well, some of it has to do with AI actually and these models that take a picture and pull features out of the picture that are geographic like a satellite picture. Now, yeah, many of our users are bringing this satellite picture. They use our tools to pull features like changes of building patterns or changes of, you know, illegal forestry cutting in the jungle. They actually make a map out of it automatically. Or at the other end of the scale, people using our little handheld software that go in the field and they take a picture of something and it describes in text and does an update on the GIS database from the field without knowing much about it. So this idea of optical, or sometimes it's called visual computing, is increasingly automating data coming into these systems. Or, you know, you and I had this conversation this morning when I was showing you remote sensing data and imagery data from aircraft who are now from drones a lot, right? Actually the software that takes that data and pulls features out is a fundamental part of a GIS, and this probably isn't really well known.
Yeah, I think it isn't. And thinking of it that way, thinking of something that's not coordinates, that's not a point on the map in the same way, right? It's not about driving coordinates and location. Coordinates and location are a kind of fundamental integration. You know, these events happen in context. And context is provided by the other layers of information. So, you know, like donors, let's say donors are where's the money for an NGO coming from? All these places if you layer that on top of demographic data, you know, where the sources of money are coming from for an NGO and it becomes very practical.
Absolutely. And I think also making decisions about if you see that the demographics of people suffering increasing heart disease, you know, in some economic tier, speak a certain language, that tells you something as an NGO about the capacity you have to build to provide support services.
Yes. If you are able, we've been doing this project with one of the teams at UC Davis and it has to do with animal shelters and keeping humans and their animals more connected and we keep thinking about okay, how do you map that problem? Right, because that problem has a lot of information in it. Where are people needing social services? Because if those people have pets, they're starting to choose between their family and their pets, you know, their human family, I should say, and their pets, right? And if we're seeing increased building that doesn't allow pets or places that do allow pets are increasingly expensive. You know, so that's a great example where you're not going to solve the problem just by lecturing folks, take better care of your dog, you know, because it's a set of interconnected social issues. And I think the possibility of providing mapping, but one of the things that so caught my attention is you could imagine somebody out in the field talking to somebody and they're capturing that information while they're there on their iPhone. And that story I just told turns into data on a map that you can start aggregating to make decisions.
Really? I'm liking you more and more. Really? Because I'm trying so hard. It's really neat because you're describing what I love which is geography. And if you think about geography, it's not only the thematic data or disciplinary data like biology or geology or sociology. It's also the interconnections between things. So when you overlay maps on top, you know, visually you can see that this bunch of things like a disease pattern is related to this kind of environmental context and all of a sudden you say, 'Aha!' It's kind of like your mind, eye, brain, cognitive process. You discover something, right? And so visually map overlay is interesting. But in a GIS computationally you can take these different layers like the little data on a spreadsheet you overlay it against other contextual data and you find meaning.
Yeah, we would call this science I suppose and that's a good way to describe it, but that's a fancy word for just better understanding. And one of my friends, Richard Saul Wurman, talks about understanding precedes action. So by being able to see and understand things, all of us as human beings are empowered with better action.
Yeah. So in some ways, you know, geography is the integration language, maps are a way to communicate that, but it's also a way to communicate understanding to large groups and in addition to that communication, understanding and communication part, it's also a way to collaborate.
Yeah. And in the academic world it means really different disciplines, you know, well in a city also different departments like engineers can collaborate with planners by overlaying the data and they see pattern or environmentalists and developers they can overlay their interests and see where they have real conflict or where they don't and suddenly new ideas new understanding of the interest of one group versus another group kind of come together.
You know, many of our users are resource developers like oil companies or mining companies. You say, 'Oh, you know, they're the evil empire.' No, they're not. They're trying to, you know, do what they do, but increasingly by GIS, they're considering the environment or the social impacts of their activities and they're collaborating in new ways. Or another example of this is between FEMA, our federal organization that looks after disasters or watches them and responds to them, and NGOs like the Red Cross. And they're not just sort of at a distance collaborating now. They have common GIS visualization that shows, okay, the storm is coming here. Okay, let's send we're going to have to send in workers there. Same thing with organizations like Cal Fire here in the state of California where they're really tracking fires and NGOs who are attempting to respond or working with utility companies to look at, you know, what they're all starting to collaborate in ways that you would never have thought with the organizational or disciplinary separation.
