Where will you be on World GIS Day?

By Anthony Wallace on 15 November, 2016

GIS Day events from around the Globe.

Wednesday 16 November marks the 18th official World GIS Day. To celebrat, there will be over 40 events being held in Australia and New Zealand- including the first Home Delivery Asia Pacific conference taking place at the Automotive Centre of Excellence (ACE) in Melbourne.

According to the interactive map on gisday.com, there are over 1,018 events registered for the day. The celebration is open to all and aims to bring together GIS users from companies, private industries, universities, government agencies, schools and non-profits to build a stronger understanding about the Earth.

International GIS Day is celebrated annually on the Wednesday of Geography Awareness Week. Political activist Ralph Nader has been hailed as the person who inspired the creation of GIS Day. He considered GIS Day a good initiative for people to learn about geography and the uses of GIS and saw the day as an opportunity to establish grassroots movement with events open to everyone to participate.

There a number of ways to get involved, including participating in one of many events, hosting your own or taking part online.

Attend an event

There are some 44 events taking place all across Australasia Visit the GIS Day interactive web map of all the registered events.

Significantly, the very first Home Delivery Asia Pacific conference will take place tomorrow during World GIS Day. This is due to the need for innovative spatial solutions that will become increasingly important to enable efficient and reliable deliveries in complex urban environments.

Home Delivery Asia Pacific is one of nine events taking place in Melbourne and will take place at the Automotive Centre of Excellence.

Host your own event

If you cannot make one of the registered GIS Day events, it’s still not too late to organise your own event. To make it easy for you, the GIS Day website has a wide selection of resources, including templates, videos and activities that can be downloaded for free.

With separate resources for children, teens and adults, the GIS Day resource library means that anybody can partake and learn some new spatial skills, whether using GIS or not.

The Amazing Map Man for example combines the adult colouring-in craze and a superhero comic to expose the value of maps and spatial information. The Geo Treasure Hunt resources, on the other hand, explore the world’s cities and mountains with a challenging map-based interactive quiz.

Take part online

If you can’t make it to an event, you can always give some online presence by following the coverage on social media with the hashtag #GISDay. It’s also a great time to share the interesting work you’ve been doing with fellow GIS specialists over the world.