ArcGIS

And then there are links to the GeoCommons.

And then if you look at LVMPD, our Metro Police Department, or if you look at RTC-SNV, that's the Regional Transportation Commission, they also publish open data on ArcGIS.

So ArcGIS is kind of the...

The home of a lot of municipal and municipal adjacent data around the country.

We should be embracing that.

Faced with growing service demands, the town of Stouffville asked a simple question.

Could they build a better service request system using the technology they already had? The answer was Service Stouffville, an award-winning platform built on ArcGIS Online and that transforms how residents connect with local government.

Today, we're talking with the people who made it happen.

We'll explore the challenges that they were facing, the creative thinking that led to the solution, and the lessons other municipalities can take from their success.

So once we were able to showcase, OK, there's something we can do about this, it was a no brainer to prioritize it.

The other piece, and I'm sure Paul will touch on this a bit later, too, is a proof of concept was put together sort of early days to sort of showcase how could we do it? You know, what's it going to cost to do it and how easy is this going to be to maintain? And Paul, you know, through all the great things that Paul does, was able to put a proof of concept together and really showcase this is what's possible.

uh, leveraging the ArcGIS online platform.

And once senior leadership and council and mayor saw this, they were like, okay, we need to do this.

Yeah, I definitely agree.

Well, so ArcGIS supports multiple layers of intelligence.

And as we were just talking about, you know, what opportunities does this create for utilities?

Yeah, there's all sorts of things you can do, right? So as we just sort of talked about, like within the asset management framework of mapping images to structures or structures to polls, you know, that's one thing you can do is look at the map to see these images, where were they taken? How close are they to a poll, right? Like image metadata is never going to be 100% perfect.

Now we will do a lot of analysis and help groups out because we, me and one of the people we don't have in here today is Mr. Jeremy Penn.

He's a GISP, big home background and running different types of analysis in ArcGIS and ArcPro.

And so it's really great to have this knowledgeable group of GIS employees to be able to collect this data, help with the processing of this data, but then also be able to implement it.

Like Steve was saying, we work specifically with the Office of Engineering.

And so got into some ideas of mapping software.

We have certain mapping software that we use inside of the military, whether it be Falcon View or we in the Marines call it ArcGIS and the Army calls it ArcGIS.

And then finding the idea of Google Earth and being able to, you know, interweave that into our intelligence briefings to provide information a better common operational picture.

So we decided to bring John on the show and in a new format, give him a lot of the reins to be able to describe to us the reasons why he did this, what he saw along the way, and then be able to guide us through some of his content and context that he saw overseas.

It's one of those things with Afghanistan.

It's like, where do you start when it comes to explaining Afghanistan? And it's like, do you talk about the Soviets? Do you talk about the kings that were before that? Do you talk about the tribal history? And I'm actually going to shift over to a different map that I've got.

This is ArcGIS Earth.

And one of the things I love about ArcGIS is it allows me to elevate the terrain much more than usual.

As always, all of my research can be found on my Obsidian page for easy access, and if you prefer a more resilient old-school way of reading reports, you can also check out my NomadNet page, which hosts most of the same content and sources.

As for the mapping data I have shown today, everything can be found on my GitHub page as kmzfiles for import into ATAC, or if you just want to view things online and not have to worry about any of this map nerd stuff, you can visit my ArcGIS pages, which have online maps that you can sort and click and explore however you like.

For those who like to monitor the situation, I also have a dashboard built for talks which runs in a web browser and will provide a central hub where I usually bring up whatever live streams are available if we need to start live battle tracking at some point over the next couple of weeks.

I know it's a lot to take in, but I've already done most of this work, so there are a lot of resources that are available for whatever you need.