If you already thought this fall was going to be a busy conference season, add one more potential event to your list. The North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS) is bringing their annual meeting back to Madison on October 12-14th.
With a theme of “How does design make a difference?”, the meeting will bring together cartographers and designers from across North America to discuss the latest trends, techniques, and developments in the world of cartography.
The conference gets started with optional pre-conference workshops, including Practical Cartography Day (PCD). The idea behind PCD is to address real production questions, such as how to a perform a specific analysis in ArcGIS 10, how to get a desired effect in Photoshop, or understanding new features in Adobe Creative Suite 5.
Thursday and Friday are devoted to paper sessions that discuss everything from GIS, to interactive maps, and printed products.
The keynote speaker for the event is Patrick Hofmann, an expert in visual communication and interaction design. He works in the user experience design team at Google in Sydney, Australia, and has been an invited speaker at dozens of international conferences on topics of visualization, usability, and illustration – but never cartography. Responsible for such things as the design of icons on Google Maps, Patrick will be the first to say design matters .
Check out WhereCampMSN
After the full NACIS conference, all current and aspiring “GeoHackers” are invited to attend the free WhereCampMSN “unconference.” The format of the camp is completely open and unscripted. People show up and then divide into groups as dictated by their interests. The event (unevent?) is billed as a regional version of WhereCamp, an unconference for the spatially inclined.
The North American Cartographic Information Society, founded in 1980, is an organization comprised of specialists from private, academic, and government organizations whose common interest lies in facilitating communication in the map information community.
