At the end of last year we decided to send out a general interest survey to learn more about who was interested in this group, and why. Creating and distributing the form also allowed us to reach out to a few new department Listservs on campus. It worked! We got 27 respondents overall, 23 of whom did not attend any meetings last year (4 of these wanted to but were unable due to scheduling).
Respondents are enthusiastic, and looking for more experience. A good reminder that introductory-level content will always be welcome.
Two-thirds are graduate students, with a few faculty, staff, and undergrads making up the other third. People are in many different departments, especially Geography, Oceanography, Landscape Architecture, and Archaeology/Anthropology, with smaller numbers from Engineering, Agriculture, and Environmental Science.
As for the content that interests people, there is a lot of interest in QGIS, but also plenty of interest in more complex topics like programming, models, and web GIS. A lot of people expressed interest in R. If you are able to present or show work on any of these topics, please check out the presentation signup form. The more the merrier!
Most importantly, we asked about how people prefer to connect. We had to move online by the end of last semester of course, and it turned out to work quite well. We’ll be continue to meet online, over Zoom, which will allow us to record the presentations for later. People said recordings were/will be the most helpful resource for them.
We’ll continue to use our open Google drive folder (Tanvi continues to add great content to the data resources spreadsheet), and the graph above is also a good reminder to make more of an effort on this blog :/ (if you would like to write about your work here, just get in touch!).
Results were exactly split on whether 1-hour lunch-time presentations should happen every week, or every other week. TBD.
Finally, the dark-horse winner for preferred online communication method outside of a presentation/meeting context was the Zoom chat channel. Andrew set one up near the end of last year, and it’s a place where people can ask quick questions of the ether, or coordinate data sharing through the Google drive folder. We will get people from our mailing list added ASAP.
Thanks again to all who took the time to fill out the survey, we are looking forward to the coming year!
p.s. If you’re curious, here are the full results, minus e-mail addresses and such.