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NACIS 2022: See you in Minneapolis

Date posted: October 11, 2022

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The conference begins next week!

As you prepare to travel to Minneapolis, remember to:

Browse the conference program in Sched and choose which sessions you want to attend

Get the Slack app set up with the NACIS Slack group so you can participate in online conversations

Review our COVID-19 policy (summary: vaccination and masks required)

Review our Code of Conduct and always remember that “NACIS is nicest”

Take a look at the What to Expect page if you’re new to NACIS or returning after a long absence

Voting closes soon

If you haven’t voted in our latest board election, please vote before the ballot closes this Friday (10/14) at 11:59pm Pacific Time.

Student board member proposal

The voices of our student board members are critical, and at a time when we’re dedicating ourselves to increasing diversity in our Society, the perspectives of student board members are especially valuable. The NACIS Board is proposing that we extend the term for Student Board Member to two years and add a second Student Board Member, elected in alternating years.

The proposed changes to NACIS bylaws have been revised since they were last sent out in August, so please take a minute to review them again. NACIS members will be voting on this proposal at our Annual Business Meeting during lunch on Thursday, Oct. 20th.

No livestream this year

We’re not offering a livestream of the conference this year. The keynote and presentations will be recorded and posted to the NACIS YouTube channel a week or two after the meeting as we’ve done in previous years. Click here to read about why we made this difficult decision.

Please note that several presenters, for personal or work reasons, ask not to be streamed or recorded. We encourage everyone to respect that and wait for the official recordings to be posted.

Ethics and Locational Information

Image of the earth surrounded by a visible, glowing network

The American Association of Geographers (AAG), with its partners the Center for Spatial Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara and Esri, has released a new white paper, “Locational Information and the Public Interest,” culminating an effort of more than a year by its Organizing Committee, and bringing together the insights of scholars and professionals in a breadth of disciplines throughout the humanities, social and computer sciences.

This white paper, and a companion Quick Start guide for educators, are a response to growing concern within the research community about the ethical implications in the application of geospatial technologies. This is especially concerning as a largely unregulated mix of government, nonprofit, and corporate agencies have access to vast quantities of locational information for a significant proportion of the world’s population. Although many of the uses of this information are beneficial and benign, too often they are or become intrusive.

The AAG encourages you to read and share this paper with your colleagues, not only within but beyond your discipline. We believe this is an important meeting place for shared concerns about privacy, access to data, and ethical use of locational technologies.

Stay in touch

There are several ways to stay in touch with the NACIS community:

Follow us on Twitter @nacis
Join our Slack workspace
Subscribe to our email newsletter

Earth networking image by Gerd Altmann via Pixabay