Improved hardware and software technologies have allowed for new applications. One benefit is the enhancement of team computing to communicate, collaborate, and coordinate with meeting attendees. This team computing improves productivity when gathering, working with, and distributing information. A single error can be extremely costly, causing millions of dollars in losses. Reducing errors, even slightly, can yield huge benefits. Another benefit of this integration is better informed decision makers and improved understanding of situations and, hopefully, superior decisions. Most corporate data contains a spatial or geographic component, and therefore many decisions are spatial, including site selection, routing, redistricting, and ecosystem sustainability. Census applications have a significant impact on the way governmental agencies make decisions on a wide variety of topics ranging from political power and federal and state program funds, to planning for communities, public facilities, services, and schools. The democratic process requires an informed citizenry to function properly and GIS coupled with electronic meeting software can help to accomplish this.
Ventana's GroupSystems for Windows is an electronic meeting support software system comprised of a collection of tools that support group processes including the following: brainstorming, list building, categorizing, voting, organizing, prioritizing and consensus building. Data can easily be shifted from one activity or tool to another so that, for instance, a categorizer list could be voted on to determine priorities. Also, each tool can be utilized in a variety of ways. A meeting facilitator/technographer controls the software that enables the group to generate, organize, and evaluate ideas. A video display device and printer can be connected to the facilitator's computer to display results to the group on a wider screen or in a hard-copy format. Participants' comments can be gathered in multiple ways and GroupSystems automatically documents the complete record of discussions.
ArcView GIS software has buttons, tools, and menus to address spatial problems that can be based on locations, characteristics of locations, and relationships among locations. One can create and edit both geographic and tabular data and see their changes reflected immediately in maps and charts. ArcView is an excellent tool for presenting information graphically to decision makers, in charts, tables, maps, and images. ArcView charts and maps can be used to query the tables that they were created from. For example, by pointing to a slice on a pie chart, one can display the record value that it represents. "Hot links" can also be utilized to see site photos, other data including remotely sensed information, or real-time videos during a meeting. One might click on a point representing a building and then be able to see its floor plan. Decision makers might want to see a photo of a future manufacturing site to determine the appropriateness, even after scientific data have been evaluated. A click on the polygon representing this site could bring to the screen the linked photograph. Geographic hot links allow users to get to greater levels of detail by linking views at multiple scales in much the same way that hypertext links topics in related documents or links files on the Internet. All of these tools can help to provide a framework for spatial decision making.
Spatial decisions can be reactive, proactive, and/or interactive. Adding electronic meeting software to a GIS allows for the necessary mixture of quantitative and qualitative criteria for multi-objective analysis. Hierarchical decision making is an iterative process with multiple levels of decision making involved. These decisions must flow from broad scale management goals for very large regions down to the finer details required for specific operational schemes for individual tracts of land. Each inter-related level requires more precision of detail as the geographic scale becomes larger. An example of this would be going from a scale of 1: 100,000 that can be useful for looking at counties, to the larger scale of 1: 100 that can be useful for evaluating a specific site. ArcView, can be customized with its Avenue object-oriented scripts to allow meeting participants to easily produce uniquely required results. This functionality allows one to achieve new results by seeing patterns and relationships and gaining new insights that were previously obscured by the complexity and sheer volumes of data.
IBM has integrated ArcView with GroupSystems for Windows so that one may vote in ArcView and have the results show up in the GroupSystems Voting Tool where the standard deviation, mean, and total can be determined for further discussion. This was done so that geographically referenced data could be visualized and queried during voting. ArcView has also been incorporated into the GroupSystems' meeting agenda so that ArcView can be sent to the meeting participants just like each of the other electronic meeting tools. However, each meeting participant has their own copy of the data so that changes can be made simultaneously if the need arises. As long as unique names are used when data is changed or new shape files created, these can be collected on the server and then everyone can see these changes. This can be useful when boundary changes are being disputed and when there is a need to compare and contrast differing solutions. It is also a good way to determine the amount of group consensus.
Over the past year, I have used a portable LAN with IBM's Collaborative GIS solution (described above) to facilitate meetings involving multiple agencies. One very ambitious meeting involved representatives from the following agencies: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, Soil Conservation Service (Natural Resource Conservation Service), CH2M- Hill Consultants, The Nature Conservancy, National Park Service, Forest Sciences Laboratory, University of Tennessee, Natural Resources Research Institute, and CAL OWS EIS. This meeting covered numerous issues related to the fact that all data is not created or maintained equally and does not hold the same importance within a variety of agencies and for each stakeholder. The meeting objective was "Learning from Integrated Ecological Assessments: Identifying Information Needs Across Hierarchies". Specifically, they desired to share experiences among assessment teams and others, to develop a minimal list of attributes to be considered in an assessment, and to identify barriers to improved assessments. Meeting impediments to be overcome were: 1) Divergent needs of participants. 2) Cost allocation issues. 3) Freedom of Information (FOI) concerns/uncertainty of requirements. 4) Low funding levels. 5) Animosity between technical staff of different agencies with different priorities and between non-technical and technical staff. 6) Lack of participation by a key player.
As background to the meeting, two speakers discussed Decision Science from the perspectives of Ecosystem Management. One of these speakers prepared an outline of questions for the meeting participants to answer as he spoke. I put this into the Group Outliner tool of the electronic meeting software and sent it to each participant's computer screen so that they could respond electronically during the presentation. When the speaker finished, I provided him with a diskette of participants' input, and questions and comments were held until the end of the day. As the meeting proceeded, the speaker was able to summarize the comments. Meeting participants received a copy of the raw input and summarized comments. At the end of the day, the speaker briefly discussed the comments and everyone agreed that soliciting comments electronically during the presentation had saved a lot of time.
After the guest speakers concluded, the meeting was set to follow an agenda that had been set forth by only one of the participating agencies. This agenda was not well received by the other meeting participants, so a groupware tool was used to solicit everyone's input on "What is important to accomplish at this workshop?" This list was then prioritized by the meeting participants. Next, I took this input and redesigned the meeting agenda while the participants took a 10 minute break. When they returned to their computers, I confirmed their approval of the new agenda and we proceeded.
Here is an excerpt from simultaneous electronic dialogues concerning
comments, questions, and discussion of information needs:
QUESTION: "I agree that these things should be as simple as possible, but
they are not as simple as better or worse. For timber, the quantity (growth
is up and the quality is down). Is it bad that grassland birds in NE are
declining, or good if marginald is reverting to woody veg?"
RESPONSE: "You don't have to impose value judgements in your
assessment. You can say that grassland bird species are diminishing,
perhaps due to reforestation. Let the constituencies figure out if the
decline is good or bad."
RESPONSE: "But the public needs to be informed about the reference
condition to know if reforestation is good or bad, and regional/national
populations of these birds--common or endangered or what?? And what
good are the trees/birds for soil stabilization/pest control. There is an
educational component!!"
COMMENT: "Somehow I would like to get a better feel for the integration
between environmental science and human dimensions-particularly the two-
way interaction between environments and people."
QUESTION: "Are user friendly programs for conducting time series
analyses and spatial statistics available or being developed?"
RESPONSE: "SYSTAT, SAS, GS+ and many other programs do these
things, but do not have a reputation of being user friendly. I am wary of
programs that make statistics easy, they generally give you plenty of rope
to hang yourself. Better to have trained staff capable of conducting these
analyses."
QUESTION: "What are the bottlenecks found across the assessments?"
COMMENT: "The issue of scale really depends on the issue. Different
scales for different issues."
As one can see from the above example, multiple simultaneous dialogues were documented through the use of groupware to enhance the exchange of information. Being able to conduct simultaneous dialogues is one way that electronic meetings save a lot of time. In this example, 116 items were submitted by 20 people over a 15 minute time span. Everyone on the LAN was able to work on the same electronic sheets of paper at each of their individual computers, so they were able to see each others comments as soon as they were submitted. Comments that have not been seen by a particular meeting participant are flagged with red exclamation points.
Comments were electronically submitted during each of the 5 assessment presentations and were distributed in hard-copy and diskette formats for leisurely browsing of the feedback.
The GroupSystems tool, Topic Commenter, was utilized for multiple discussions. It was determined that 7 different scales needed to be addressed while answering 4 specific questions. The Topic Commenter tool utilizes sets of electronic sheets of paper that look like 3 x 5 cards with topics stated at the top. Each meeting participant was able to work with the same set of lined electronic pages in any order they chose. Each of the 4 discussion questions had 7 topic commenter cards specifically labeled for each scale.
This was a multiple day meeting, and on one of the days we brainstormed a "minimal list of critical themes and attributes needed for ecological assessments". This list from the Brainstorming tool was then switched to the Categorizing tool. Then we placed these items into 20 categories. Next, I switched this data to the Group Outliner tool for further comment. The 20 categories or themes were then utilized to structure brainstorming of "the barriers to developing integrated ecological assessments". This was done by setting up the Topic Commenter tool with 20 labeled topic commenter cards. This generated 173 comments which could be voted on to prioritize which ones to work on first.
Here are just a few of the 173 barriers or impediments to be overcome: 1) "Publish or perish system under which scientists work lead to protection of improved data and methods." 2) "Lack of models (or at least data and parameters to drive existing models) for estimating change in recreation supply/demand due to shifts in resource conditions and exogenous socioeconomic variables." 3) "Historic problems with the quality of weather data. Data kriged at the state level often shows strong disparities at the state boundaries. Need interstate analyses of original data." 4) "In spatial data (e.g. Landsat), inconsistent and undocumented application of clustering algorithms, methods, etc. Especially problematic in analyzing landscape change." 5) "Solution - agree on specific primary data (based on common or similar needs). Then get President or Vice-President to say this is the law to Department heads - no funding for any surveys or monitoring without complying on new proposals. However, agencies must be given flexibility to add primary data, but must collect minimum set."
As the final use of GroupSystems, I requested meeting evaluation comments using the Electronic Brainstorming tool. Here are some of the remarks: 1) "The technology is useful and welcome, once participants understand that they also have ample opportunities for direct human contact and exchanges." 2) "The group systems tool has a lot of potential. It was good to capture the thoughts, but I would have liked to have used the voting tool more." 3) "Initially I was intimidated with this machine/approach, and worried that it might lead to ineffective and impersonal communication. HOWEVER, I, as always, learned another lesson and am pleased and impressed with this tool." 4)"I found this to be very useful. The mix of this and dialog captures a lot of information. I also liked the use of this during presentations as a way of generating comments. The meeting was very useful. I believe that progress was made towards some national consistency in conducting assessments." 5) "I thought this was innovative, and very useful in producing reports and providing abundant opportunities for comment. Perhaps we could have focused on one particular level of assessments, "regional". Going through a particular example would have been good." 6) "This meeting was necessary at this juncture given the large number of assessments that are occurring. A great deal of experience is being built and the knowledge gained really needed to be captured. Seems there is a need for a continuing working group to come together at least one more time to continue sharing and learning. I think some of the presentations were much too long."
After the workshop, TERRA Lab (a consortium of government agencies focused on natural resources management and global change) placed the meeting information on the Internet so that individuals who were unable to attend could participate in the discussions.
The advantages of cooperative development are seen to lie in economies of scale, creation of a critical mass of expertise, and standardized data and systems. Ecological assessment is the process by which we describe the status of ecosystems, their components, related processes and effects. This process also describes associated interactions with scientific rigor in a manner socially, culturally, and politically relevant to the public, and to decision makers. The issue of assessing uncertainty in expert judgments about natural resources was also discussed. Judgmental assessments and predictions of biological, physical, social, and economic phenomena are necessary inputs for policy and managerial decisions about natural resource management. Uncertainty assessments can be used to compare alternative projects and risks, help prevent mistakes, communicate and justify decisions, guide research, and establish ecological monitoring programs. A working definition of uncertainty, a general rationale for quantifying and using uncertainty in decision-making, and a set of structured processes and guidelines for estimating uncertain quantities, values, relationships, and events were presented. The purpose of assessments is to make better decisions regarding allocations and/or regulations of resources. Decisions are made on individual resources set in a larger ecological context. This meeting was designed to begin the dialogue on common issues, information, and questions that need to be addressed at various scales for integrating information across hierarchies.
(TM): ArcView is a registered trademark of Environmental Systems
Research Institute, Inc., Redlands, CA.
(TM): GroupSystems is a registered trademark of Ventana Corporation,
Tucson, AZ.
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