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Given that today is GIS Day I was wondering what people had run/been to/ had ideas for as function for GIS day.

I have seen a few I have liked but any other stories would be awesome.

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GIS Day is a perfect day to promote GIS within your organisation. Setup something fun - showcase videos like GeoSpatial Revolution or if your in local government, try to woo the people with the budget strings with a video on the role of GIS in Government 2.0

I think its all about showing the non-GIS people in where you work, the potential on what can be done with GIS.

So perhaps also show some live demos of good looking mapping websites like Greeley, St Lawrence and Mapnificent.

Depending on when your reading this, its not too late to do this now - send a nicely constructed email to 'All Staff' :)

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geocache party / treasure hunt, where the treasure is booz and pizza

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We host a poster contest where all of our GIS staff (although the contest is open to anyone) each make one poster showcasing a GIS project they did in the past year that added value, solved a problem, etc. within our company. Of course we do live demos of our web apps and use the event as an evangelistic opportunity. The posters are voted on by all of the employees that come to marvel at our coolness and gobble up cake and cookies. Any decent bakery can take a image of the GIS Day logo and put it on a cake for you. The grand prize is a free ride (plane tix, hotel, meals, fun) for the winning poster author and a guest to the ESRI UC in San Diego for 7 days - one sweet prize if you ask me. The event is very well attended and we get pop-ins from VPs and usually our CEO who then really get to see who is doing what and the impact that GIS has on our organization. We put up flyers in our buildings and spam people weeks in advance to advertise.

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Our company often holds an open day, so spouses and family can come and see what we do and what GIS/Spatial is all about. We also invite students from local GIS programs to come and check it out too to get an idea of what real GIS work involves.

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For our GIS day we do a variety of things, some of the things we do that I didnt see in a previous answer are:

  1. UAV - very cool tech. you can let people do short recorded flights and geo-rectify or other quick simple processes so they can see their flight on a map.

  2. Historical Maps, people are always interested in seeing maps of their area over time.

  3. Total-Station & GPS/GNSS demos - show case different setups and let the user mess around with them, shoot distances, directions, etc...

Also the treasure hunt is a very popular thing. We have tried both GPS and Total Station type treasure hunts and the total station one was actually more fun and thought intensive. Give the user a set of bearings and distances to one point and then the next, etc... till they locate the prize. We made sure they could use simple transits and chains to measure as we did not have enough total stations nor did we want to check out total stations to novices that may damage them........

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