The alphabet soup of professional organizations representing the various disciplines and sectors of the geospatial community has formed the Coalition of Geospatial Organizations (COGO). This new forum will foster discussion of policy and technical issues, promote openness and effective collaboration, and present a united front on issues of common concern — whenever its components agree.
Member organizations
· American Congress on Surveying and Mapping (ACSM)
· American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS)
· Association of American Geographers (AAG)
· Cartography and Geographic Information Society (CaGIS)
· Geospatial Information Technology Association (GITA)
· GIS Certification Institute (GISCI)
· Management Association for Private Photogrammetric Surveyors (MAPPS)
· National States Geographic Information Council (NSGIC)
· University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS)
· Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA)
Advisory organizations
· National Association of Counties (NACo)
· National Emergency Number Association (NENA)
· Western Governors Association (WGA)
· American Planning Association (APA)
The geospatial industry consists of individuals, private companies, non-profit organizations, academic and research institutions, and government agencies that research, develop, manufacture, and employ geospatial technology (also known as geomatics) — including geographic information systems (GIS), total stations for surveying, the Global Positioning System (GPS) and other global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), light detection and ranging (LIDAR), and multi-spectral imaging. Geospatial disciplines include surveying, geodesy, mapping, cartography, remote sensing (satellite imagery and aerial photography), and geographic information science. The market for geomatics products can be divided, by level of accuracy, into consumer grade, resource grade, and survey grade — each with its own industry leaders.
In turn, each of these components of the geospatial industry is represented by one or more of COGO’s member organizations (plus a few associations of hardware manufacturers and software vendors). Because of their different traditions and the overlapping and sometimes conflicting interests of their members, these national geospatial organizations have occasionally clashed — most notably last year, when they lined up on opposite sides of a lawsuit on federal procurement practices. To try to avoid future misunderstandings and enhance their collective voice, they have formed the Coalition of Geospatial Organizations, or COGO for short. (The name is an inside joke, because cogo has for decades been the abbreviation for coordinate geometry, a set of procedures for encoding and manipulating bearings, distances and angles of survey data into co-ordinate data.) COGO aims to help member organizations communicate better with each other, produce educational materials for their members, align and strengthen their policy agendas, and develop strategies to address national issues.
COGO will undertake legal or advocacy action strictly by unanimous consent, in effect giving each organization veto power. According to NSGIC’s president, Cy Smith, the members reasoned that “we would not be able to accomplish our purpose — which is to focus the power and influence of all of our organizations to make progress on shared objectives — if we don’t have 100 percent unanimity.” The hope is that, whenever COGO’s members have major disagreements, they will discuss them frankly, rather than make assumptions about each other’s motives and intentions.
COGO does not plan to have its own staff; rather, the member organizations will take turns carrying out joint tasks. It might, however, publish reports, have a Web site, and facilitate the merging of annual conferences with declining attendance.
The idea to form COGO, Smith told me, first emerged about six years ago at a NSGIC strategic planning retreat, when the discussion turned to ways to get more cooperation from other organizations on the implementation of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) and other shared goals. NSGIC put the idea in its strategic plan, then broached it to URISA and other organizations, and this led to informal stakeholder meetings, beginning in 2003. Last August, participants decided to set up a more formal structure and during the first half of this year they formulated rules of operation and procedure. The organization will be formally launched in early August, during the annual ESRI International User Conference.
Among the developments that spurred the formation of COGO, Smith told me, was the effort to move forward Imagery for the Nation (IFTN) and other components of the NSDI. “We were not coordinating our activities very well,” he says. “We thought that we could do a lot more.”
Smith hopes that COGO will not “get bogged down” in some of the many mundane activities that it could undertake and focus, instead, on the NSDI and related efforts. Much of the geospatial community, Smith explains, has settled on “for the nation” initiatives as the best way to develop data for the various components of the NSDI. “Those,” he told me, “are things for which we need broad funding support from all levels of government, particularly the federal government and Congress. I would anticipate that we would use COGO to generate that support. It is going to enable us to define an advocacy agenda and pursue it within our individual organizations and then within Congress and the federal agencies.”
Other organization will bring different projects and priorities to the table. GITA, for example, has been working with the U.S. Department of Labor on GIS classifications and the AAG has educational objectives. “In the very short term,” Wendy Nelson, the executive director of URISA, told me, “I believe that COGO must continue to reach out to allied organizations that might have an interest in participating, so that we can finalize membership when we meet in August and then move the organization forward. Medium-term, I think it’s important that COGO participants come to a speedy agreement on two or three items of substance on which to concentrate its collective efforts. What those items will be is anyone’s guess… but I believe we now have a framework to discuss issues that affect our collective memberships in a positive and efficient manner.”
John Palatiello, the executive director of MAPPS, told me that he doesn’t have any priorities for COGO but hopes that it will make the geospatial community more effective “by speaking with one voice.”
Curt Sumner, the executive director of ACSM, does not expect COGO to lend its support on many issues, but believes that it will create an atmosphere for dialogue that will alleviate some of the misunderstandings in the geospatial community. “We did not go into it with specific issues in mind,” he told me, “but things will happen as the geospatial world evolves.”
Far from seeing COGO as a top-driven organization, Sumner believes that its positions will ultimately be driven by the memberships of the member organizations. He expects geospatial practitioners to be very involved and perhaps represent their organizations at COGO meetings. Ultimately, he says, COGO “can help people in our professions and the general public understand better the whole geospatial world and how it works.”
Robert Samborski, GITA’s executive director, told me that, at a minimum, COGO could help with such mundane tasks as coordinating conference schedules. A mid-range goal, he says, would be for it to allow the geospatial community to discuss problems like last year’s lawsuit and “clean its own laundry,” rather than “being surprised.” He also sees COGO as a potential advocacy and lobbying body — while most of the member organizations, being 501(c)3 nonprofits, are not allowed to lobby. One issue that cuts across the whole geospatial community and might be a focus for COGO problem-solving, Samborski says, is “the looming workforce crisis.”
According to Jim Plasker, executive director of the ASPRS, the primary purpose for formalizing COGO is “to stem the continued balkanization of the geospatial community, which unfortunately intensified with the events of the past several years. This fragmentation was largely caused by misinformation, miscommunication and severe mistrust between key groups within the community. Therefore, I would anticipate that the top priority for COGO in the short- to mid-term would be to ensure full and open communication among the community, with the goal of eliminating this internal threat and hopefully redirecting our energy outward in a positive manner by encouraging community-wide backing of critical infrastructure initiatives. These initiatives would hopefully include coordination and funding for such proposed efforts as Imagery for the Nation, Elevation and/or Lidar for the Nation, and the National Land Imaging Program, to name just a few.”
