When WICDI presented at the 2020 Annual Spring WLIA Conference in February, we had no idea it would be our last in-person presentation for months to come. The thought of being in a room with dozens to hundreds of other people feels foreign and intimidating now, to say the least.
However, in the past several months we’ve become well-versed in the art of the virtual meeting, and its close cousin, the virtual presentation. In today’s blog post, I’ll recap both our in-person and our online presentations for WLIA this year.
In a 30-minute presentation, Genevieve (our Research Specialist) and I walked through WICDI’s origins, current work, and future plans. We highlighted the results of previous all-day workshops, especially our plan to create a survey where Community of Practice members could rank culvert data attributes based on their usefulness to that member’s organization/agency.
Click here for a link to the PDF of our presentation.
After we wrapped up, SCO’s Hayden Elza took the floor to present on a topic relevant to WICDI: spatial data infrastructures, using his Collaborative Support Environment as a case study. Hayden balanced out the tech-heavy aspects of his presentation with plenty of cute cat pictures.
Hayden’s slides discussed his role at SCO, his interests in FOSS and open source GIS, and his work on developing a cloud-based collaborative data environment for WICDI using AWS. For a link to Hayden’s presentation, click here, then click anywhere on the screen to advance the presentation.
Fast forward about three months, and the WICDI team and I are getting ready to present at WLIA again – this time, through a virtual webinar. We wanted this session to be more of a roundtable discussion, so we invited a few Community of Practice members to join us in sharing culvert project updates and insights.
Over the course of an hour, we and our panelists covered topics ranging from FEMA’s disaster mitigation programs to a new culvert inventory being carried out by Wisconsin Wetlands and partners. I encourage you to check out the presentation slides here. Pre-recording the presentation as a group (each from our own working-at-home setup) was a new experience for many of us, but we rose to the challenge and came out with a diverse and interesting program.
Please feel free to reach out to any of us at WICDI, or to the presenters linked in these slides, with any questions on the material. We’re looking forward to future events, virtual or not!
