“Not coming to today’s NJGF meeting is like not showing up at church on Easter” – Andy Rowan, Director of the New Jersey Office of GIS, quoting an anonymous NJGF member.

Show up people did. The venue for the regularly-scheduled quarterly NJGF meeting was changed in anticipation of a much higher than normal turnout (FTR, the regular venue’s capacity would have been sufficient to accommodate the attendance, IMHO).

I saw and chatted with people I hadn’t seen in years, like Hank Garie (currently with Grant Thornton), Larry Thornton (officially retired from the NJDEP), and Mark Fiorentino of TomTom (formerly Tele Atlas).

I had seen and heard Jack present many times before. Ever the charismatic, excellent speaker, he did not disappoint. Jack spoke for about an hour and a half, using a PowerPoint presentation and no notes. Here are some snippets from Jack’s presentation I thought were interesting:

• We are on the cusp of a new modality
• Our field is computational geography
• Parcel mapping is the foundation of a civil society – it documents property
• Multiple references to Google and Google Earth (“the Google Earth phenomenon”)
• Multiple references to Amazon
• Gov 2.0 is government as a platform (personal eyeroll)
• The cloud – all it is is another computer I can access
• Jack now has an iPhone and an Android (up until a year ago he proudly owned no smart phone)
• ArcGIS 10.1 coming this summer
• State of NJ will use Esri base map in NJ State Plane
• Joke: A consultant has never built anything but they know all about it.

Jack took a couple of questions and left at noon.

(Photo credit @cmcclain_nj, source)