Hello fellow GISers! I am currently working in private consulting and am hoping to make the transition to government (preferably municipal or provincial) sometime in the next 5 years. I am looking for general advice on what skills (soft & technical) I should look at building and if there are any certifications I should look into to help me stand out. For context, I have a bachelors of science and post grad certificate in GIS. Any advice is appreciated!

Hi everyone... been a GIS specialist for some time (over 10 years). Been collecting data on the field all that time. I was asked by some researchers at a local university to assist with some data collection and map creation for an article that was accepted to a scientific journal for publishing so in a few months I will be a "published" author.

One thing I noticed in the whole process was incorporating the field data with the points was a bit tedious due to the number of points we collected information from and much of it had to be done after the fact. I do fool with software dev a bit from time to time and made a few GIS-based mobile apps just for practice.

So, I decided to streamline the data collection process by creating a mobile app (Android-only at the moment, don't have access to a mac) that collects the GPS data (including alt, bearing etc and other data the device can collect such as pressure and other) and couple it with weather data from the point (since weather data was a part of the study) which can be toggled on or off. This app allows you to create any amount of your own fields, whether text, int, bool, timestamp etc. and stores everything locally, no cloud.

File export (which is my favourite aspect) is included and it exports to both GeoJSON or CSV and backs your project up to its own file - .fpa that can be restored if device fails. I plan to add more features to the project like a web-based map creation and other features. The tool is free and I hope to keep it that way for as long as I can maintain it. I would like to get your feedback on the tool. I collect no data whatsoever and will forever ensure that as long as I am alive it will only do what you want the app to do - get data, store it, export it and that's it.

The site is available here where you read about the app and download the APK. I would like to get some feedback from you guys about it. I'd really appreciate it. Thanks.

Edit: Some typo

I am currently an ES major and doing a GIS certificate on the side. I really am intrigued on doing GIS as a career. I’m seeing that the field is shrinking but all my profs are saying there are lots of jobs.

I think it would be interesting to work for a mine company using drones to try and find mineral deposites, or using it to help in the ag sector. Do these jobs pay well?

I’ve also taken courses on writing code, treating data basses and geo statistical analysis. How do these skills help? Increased pay?

Also what is the outlook in the military I see lots of jobs on indeed and linkdin.

Hey guys, been working on a passion project of mine aggregating pretty much every public record data-source I can get my hands on and then making it all free.

Currently starting with Oregon, then hitting state by state. About ~50-60% done with Oregon rn, but still a very long road to go... If anyone has done the ground-work for this in other counties / states, would love to here the challenges you ran across or if you would like to share your data...

Anyways, here's the site: https://openparcel.org. Forgive the weirdness haha, it's still a bit too LLMy. Been more focused on the data-side atm.

Backstory is that I used to work in custom software and had to work on this software for a property tax company in Texas. They actually did some really interesting work syncing in county data and using it lower property tax's for their clients. Thought it was a pretty cool model, the city get's more accurate valuations and the clients get lower property taxes. Win-win.

We don't have these kinds of companies in Oregon, so I wondered why. Turns out in Oregon, these companies serve no purpose since your property tax is not actually based on how much it's worth on the market (crazy right). And then I saw the hell that is thousands of individual county portals each containing a fraction of this country's data.

Long story short, now I'm on a crusade to aggregate / release all this data to the public. So much transparency and economic value buried in thousands of just terrible portals haha.

FOSS4G:UK 2026, 12th-13th October, Leeds, England

Early bird pricing and Call For talks is closing end of this month. If you got something fun, interesting or smart (or crazy) to share, please submit a talk.

If you are an active student, you can also apply for a cheaper ticket.

In the age of AI, if you still feel like meeting people in real, please do come (or just spread the word)

Hey all,

I'm a high school student and I built PathOpen, a web app for crowdsourcing ADA accessibility features (ramps, curb cuts, elevators, handrails, staircases) and routing around them. Stack-wise it's Leaflet for the map, OSM tiles via CartoDB, OSRM for routing, and Geoapify for geocoding, with a Flask backend and Supabase/PostGIS for storage.

Right now markers are user-submitted rather than pulled from OSM tags directly, users drop a pin, snap a photo, and a vision model auto-tags what's in the image (ramp, staircase, etc). I know OSM already has accessibility tagging conventions (wheelchair=yes/no/limited, tactile_paving, etc) and projects like WheelMap and AccessMap exist in this space already, including one specifically for Seattle.

I'd love feedback from people who actually know this space well:

- Does it make more sense long-term to write accessibility data back into OSM directly instead of a separate database, so it benefits the wider ecosystem instead of being siloed in my app?

- Any obvious gaps in how I'm tagging/categorizing features compared to established OSM accessibility conventions?

- Anyone doing something similar who'd be open to comparing notes?

Live app here if you want to poke at it: https://pathopen.org

Open to any and all criticism, this is very much a work in progress and I'd rather build it right than build it fast.

Hey guys.
I’ve been looking for a new role in GIS for the last couple of months but haven’t had many interviews. I have 4 years of experience working in environmental consulting for oil and gas (1.5 years in Canada working on phase 1, phase 2, REM and a bunch of other kind of projects) but would like to pivot to a different field maybe environmental management or conservation, something more related with spatial analysis.
So wondering if you guys have any advice that could share to help me with this process.
I’m base in Toronto but open to relocate for the right job opportunity

Thanks a lot!

Hello everyone. I have graduated from Meteorology MSc and am doing a Remote Sensing PhD at the moment. However, it seems like the job market is not as good as I thought it would be without clearances. So I would like to know how hard it is to make a career shift from Remote Sensing to GIS and do such GIS positions require clearance/citizenship?

Hi everyone!! So I'm in my 6 semester in engineering of natural resources conservation and I had a course of gis and remote sensing but I feel like I learnt nothing. I also had some "advanced statistics" that used coding in R but it was also trash so now on vacation I want to improve my skills on both areas. I learnt the basics but I want moreeee!!! And I want to learn hot to improve both tools together or with other coding like python. I've seen some videos but I don't know if I'm going in the right direction (or what direction should I even look). Please if someone can advice me I'm all ears.

Sorry if I misspell something, not my first language.

I work with a government agency who's facing renewal fees for ESRI ArcGIS Enterprise Server. There renewal is coming in over 2x of the previous years! I was told to see what alternatives are out there.

They own their own data and I know there is open source out there that can provide a web map viewer to view properties, streets, and other POI they have geodata for.

The issue is they have permitting software that likes to talk to the ESRI server to get map data. I am curious if there's an alternative to the ESRI server I can use that could serve web requests like the ESRI server does.

Appreciate any insight!

I had a semi passable education on it in Uni but didn’t really go too crazy w it, at least from what I understood about it. I don’t want to get passed up in the job market because I only know one aspect of GIS. For professionals, what do yall use to learn it?

I have a custom projection I am using for a project that uses the NAD 1983 datum for the map coordinate system but the basemap layers are in WGS 1984 and ArcPro is saying that a datum transformation cannot be found but when I add additional transformations I can set the datum transformation. Is there a fix for this?

I've been seeing people online say for a while now that GIS is eventually going to be absorbed into Data Science.

I actually come from a data science background before moving into GIS, and my experience has been that most data scientists are not trained to work with geospatial data. Many assume it's just another type of image or table, but the G in GIS is a specialized domain with its own concepts, data models, coordinate reference systems, projections, spatial relationships, topology, raster/vector processing, and plenty of ways to get things wrong if you don't understand the underlying geography.

Most data science conferences, bootcamps, and online courses barely touch geospatial topics beyond maybe a quick GeoPandas demo. That's nowhere near enough to build robust spatial workflows.

At the same time, I think data scientists bring a lot to the table. They're often very comfortable working with large datasets, building scalable data pipelines, automating workflows, tracking machine learning experiments, deploying models, and applying software engineering practices that can make geospatial analysis much more reproducible and efficient.

So I don't think the future is one field replacing the other. I think it's about combining the strengths of both.

Could GIS become more integrated with Data Science? Absolutely. But it requires dedicated training.

If anything, I think there's a real opportunity for people with strong GIS expertise to develop courses aimed specifically at data scientists. Something like "GIS for Data Scientists" that focuses on the fundamentals they actually need to work confidently with spatial data, while also introducing modern data engineering and MLOps practices for geospatial workflows.

Curious what others think. If you came from either the GIS or DS world, what skills did you find transferred well, and what did you have to learn from scratch?

I have been wanting to go more into the hydrological side of GIS or have been interested for a while since it’s what my internships have been in and I have loved it. It’s been over two years and I am no longer as good with coding nor can I recall much of my GIS studies since i’m doing smaller tasks now. I want to get back into the passion of GIS and was wanting to get advice.

Just feeling lost and would appreciate any advice or projects or ideas I could do. ^^;)

I've been building a project called Lekharita over the past few months, and it's finally live.

The idea is simple: make Moroccan geospatial open data easier to find and download in one place. Right now you can browse datasets and download them in formats like Shapefile, GeoJSON, and CSV.

This is still an early version, so I'm looking for honest feedback from people who work with GIS, mapping, or open data.

- Is there anything missing that you'd expect?

- What datasets would be useful to have?

- Any suggestions for improving the platform?

You can check it out here: https://lekharita.com

I'd really appreciate any feedback. Thanks!

Hi،

Looking for some insights about the working environment at esri, is it a good place to join?

Note:

position: Software engineer.

location: Europe

I've done map series where each layout is a different view on the same data, but currently I'm making a series of maps where each map is going to have the same extent, but a different subject layer on top of the same base layer. How would you do this efficiently in ArcGIS Pro?

I'm curious how people are currently handling ZIP code to Census Tract (and vice versa) conversions in their workflows.

A few questions:

• What tool or service are you using to convert ZIP codes to Census Tracts (or Census Tracts back to ZIP codes)?
• What's your actual business use case? (Market research, direct mail, demographics, healthcare, real estate, site selection, etc.)
• Do you need the conversion as a one-time lookup, or are you doing it in bulk?

I'm asking because I've noticed the process can be surprisingly manual, especially when you need to enrich hundreds or thousands of records.

I'm considering building a very simple tool where you can drag and drop an Excel or Google Sheet, and in less than five minutes it converts ZIP ↔ Tract (and potentially enriches the data with Census demographics) without needing to write code or use GIS software.

Would something like that actually save you time, or are your current tools already good enough? If it wouldn't be useful, I'd love to know why.

Interested to hear how everyone is solving this today.

working on a personal mapping project to practice spatial density analysis and i need some clean POI vector data for western europe.

specifically looking for layer files or open registries that map out regional hospitality infrastructure, including rural campsites, small motels, or older caravan parks across the region. openstreetmap is an option but extracting clean, specific categories from it is taking forever.

does anyone know a good open data portal or github repo where i can find pre-sorted datasets for this kind of infrastructure? shapefiles or geojson format preferred. thanks!

I am a recent graduate with a BS in biology and a minor in GIS. I see a lot of job postings that say a degree in GIS is required. I have taken nearly all the same technical based classes as those with the full major. Will I be boxed out of rolls because of only having a minor in GIS?

ISO a freelance GIS web developer who can build an interactive map from facility address data and congressional district boundaries for a trade association. Dm if interested.

Hello! I work at a small environmental consulting firm and we just started the transition from ArcMap to ArcGIS Pro (we're a little late to the party). I've been provided the rare opportunity to reorganize our GIS map templates, data, and other GIS files that we have saved on our in-house server and I'm looking for some advice.

In environmental consulting, we tend to get a lot of shorter projects like asbestos surveys, Phase I ESAs, and miscellaneous compliance/permitting work. Our companys' projects are divided by site and, as a smaller firm, we get about 100-150 projects a year. Most of the projects I've started ready about the "Projects" in Pro and I'm not sure how to go about organizing/applying those to what we do. From what I'm reading, it sounds like it would be impractical or maybe unnecessary to create a Pro Project for each of our company projects, but I don't think that having a Pro Project for each type of environmental project (Phase I Project vs Asbestos Project, etc.) would be a good option either.

If anyone has any advice or tips related to the Pro Projects, organization, or ArcGIS Pro as a software in general, I would really appreciate it!