The Spatial Connection

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Introduction to The Spatial Connection Podcast
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Kelly: Welcome back to The Spatial Connection, the podcast where we explore the fascinating journeys of geospatial professionals and dive into the incredible ways location based technologies are shaping our world. I'm your host, Kelly McGee, and today's guest is Kingsley Allen, a GIS pioneer who witnessed the rise of GIS when geographers had few career options beyond teaching or mapmaking for large companies.

Kelly: In a time when computers were just beginning to enter university geography departments, our guest started his GIS journey by learning not GIS, but GIS. A rather remote sensing. Then he faced the challenge of finding a job in an industry that was just beginning to get traction. His first opportunity came when a Japanese company looking to break into the U S market took a chance on this young geographer, a decision made even more fortunate for him because Kingsley happened to speak Japanese.

Kelly: A skill that set him apart from other applicants looking to get started in this not yet so well known industry. His story is a story of persistence, [00:01:00] innovation, and the early days of GIS. And it's one you won't want to miss.

Kelly: All right.

Meet Kingsley Allen: A GIS Pioneer
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Kelly: Welcome to the show Kingsley. Today we got Kingsley Allen. Kingsley worked for the Illinois state water survey for over 28 years as a GIS manager. I think he's got a pretty interesting story. Everybody, I think you're going to enjoy listening to him today. He's got a lot to talk about and. He's got a lot of history to, to share with us as well.

Kelly: Kingsley, how are you doing?

Kingsley: I'm doing fantastic. I'm very happy to be here. It's good talking to you again, Kelly. It's been a long time.

Kelly: It has been a long time. Oh, so as we talked before this, this podcast, we want to get everybody to get a chance to learn about some people and some of their careers, how they got involved with GIS.

Kelly: Kind of the path that they've taken and, you know, I definitely want to share your story because I think it's kind of interesting as well. And, you know, it's kind of nice when we get a chance, some of us that have been in the GIS industry for quite some time to hear how those that have been in the GIS [00:02:00] industry.

Kelly: And we're still fortunate that fortunate enough that when we started GIS really wasn't much of a industry as it is today. It's kind of nice to hear some of those older stories and, you know, we'll start sharing some of those today.

Early Career Challenges and Breakthroughs
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Kelly: So I'd like to start off with, you know, tell us a little bit about maybe how you heard about GIS.

Kelly: Where did you first, you know, kind of come into the knowing and learning about the GIS and not, you know, just the GIS industry in whole. I'll let you start from there.

Kingsley: Yeah. So I'm old enough, right. That, that back in the day, you could get a job in GIS by knowing what GIS stood for because it was so new.

Kingsley: And. So in fact, I was fortunate, the university I went to, they had had a fire in the building where the geography department was located, and that allowed them to invest in new computer equipment. So before then, you know, geographers, the only jobs they were getting were school teachers virtually, and maybe working occasionally for, for [00:03:00] large industries that were making the maps and things like that.

Kingsley: So. We began to have computers in my geography department. And so I began to learn a little bit of remote sensing and things like that. So, but that was really before GIS was the big word. It was, it was something that. Was only kind of only a sub note. In fact, I'll mention that just to age myself. My cartography class was pen and ink.

Kingsley: Literally, we had a pen set that you'd work on vellum and it was you learn a lot because here you're making map projections without a computer. So you're drawing the different shape of the grid, and you're trying to literally yourself a hand dry and the shapes of the continents in this, in this new projection.

Kingsley: So that was, that was my cartography class. But fortunately for me, if I can continue on Kelly,

Kelly: please,

Kingsley: fortunately for me, I was.

First GIS Experience and Learning Curve
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Kingsley: I was interested in exploring and so on [00:04:00] my campus, I would to walk into the building where geography was, I would sometimes from the parking lot, walk through other buildings and I was walking through one of the science buildings, probably the physics building and I saw advertised on one of their bulletin boards, this student opportunity for, uh, they call them science and engineering research semesters.

Kingsley: So it's basically, uh, yeah. An internship. And it wasn't in the geography building, it was in the, in the physics building. And so I, I thought, that's curious, and so I applied for it, and lo and behold, to the surprise of my geography professors, I was awarded this, this internship at, uh, the Pacific Northwest Laboratories, which is a Department of Energy site up in, uh, the eastern part of the state of Washington.

Kingsley: And when I went there, that was where I first got my chance to use GIS. They sent me to, uh, a week long training course using a public domain GIS called GRASS. [00:05:00] And, uh, once I had my training, then for the rest of my internship, I was able to just use that software on, in those days, the computers were really big, you know, these were 100, 000 machines.

Kingsley: It was a mass comp and the operating systems were only Unix in those days. And, uh, so it was just a delight being able to. To on this black monitor, draw colored lines that you could add different layers through all command lines. So that was, that was my first experience with GIS. Uh, my, I really didn't actually get it in college.

Kingsley: The courses I was getting in college were remote sensing. So we were using like ERDAS and, uh, the predecessors to that in, in my geography classes. So that's kind of how it started. It was, it was new enough industry that again, it, it. It surprised my professors that, that it was big enough that somebody else would teach it to me.

Kingsley: And it's interesting when [00:06:00] you, you said using the command line to make maps, you know, unfortunately people don't enjoy the whole GUI as much as we probably do nowadays. It was the old days. I had a lot of command line. It was the old days. I probably had like 20 megabytes on that big computer that you had from memory.

Kingsley: It did. And you know, in those days, The way, you didn't really have any good help screens either. You knew somebody was a good power GIS user when you walked past their desk and they had five manuals open. They would just be spread out on their desk. They'd be open. They were ring binders. So you could be right at the page because you had to go from command to command, trying to figure out.

Kingsley: You'd have to learn the whole host of possibilities of commands before you could begin to use them. And that was, that was your reference. There was no two windows. Your screen did kind of one thing. It did, it did his GIS and you didn't have a separate window for help. So

Kelly: that is very true. Well, that that's some memories there.

Kelly: [00:07:00] Yeah. So, so you learn a little bit about GIS there. Yeah. So where'd you go from there?

Navigating the Job Market in the Early GIS Days
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Kingsley: Well, from there, um, I finished my, my geography degree, came back to it, and from there I had, uh, I sent out resumes trying to get a job, and I used one of the professional journals trying to figure out who I could get a job from.

Kingsley: It was new enough that, that municipalities really weren't using GIS that much anymore. This was back in 1988. And so you're looking at the professional journal. It was the journal of photogrammetric engineering and remote sensing. And I sent out to everybody who was a, I think there's a list of sustaining sponsors of that organization or members or something like that.

Kingsley: Sent out 78 resumes.

Kelly: They're all in the back of the,

Kingsley: They're all in the

Kingsley: back. Exactly right. In the journal. 78 resumes. Yes. And. And none of them responded [00:08:00] positively. None of it trickled in the, the, the, everybody ignored it or the rejections trickled in or, uh, the couple that did respond had already found a job by then.

Kingsley: I, I actually got my first job because of a connection that my professor had. He had been to a conference, he had met some, some people at that conference and they were able to To hire me on and that's how I got my first job was through that connection. I didn't, I didn't get it through being able to find it.

Kingsley: Now, remember, Hey, that's still a good way. There was no internet then. I let's, let's take it way back. There was no internet. There was no monster board. There was no, GIS jobs, there was no internet, you had to get it through professional journals or advertisements or calling newspapers. It was just super hard.

Kingsley: And it was, GIS was so spread out that, uh, my [00:09:00] first job had to take me all across the country. It took me from, from the Midwest, excuse me, from the Mountain West clear out to the East coast. That's how far you had to go for GIS jobs. Um, and, uh, that job was a company called. It was a Japanese company. I'd actually, in my teenage, late teenage years, early twenties, I'd actually served as a, as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints to Japan.

Kingsley: So I had this language skills. So that's what helped me get the job when they, my professor found this Japanese company was trying to break into the U. S. market. And so they just kind of hired me on. And So I moved in to New Jersey working for this company and then got, that's the first time I began using ESRI software.

Kingsley: It was ArcInfo then. It was still, you know, black [00:10:00] screen, learning all the commands. And it was early enough in those days that when you called technical support, you'd get the same person on the phone and you got to know the same group of four people that were answering your questions. And. Here's, here's an interesting story.

Kingsley: One day I'm calling up technical support and an unfamiliar voice answers the phone and it was Jack Dangerman answered the technical support phone number while the others were away from their desk or ran through, or it was just odd hours at the time zone change or something like that. And, uh, And he just basically says, well, now, while I've got you on the phone.

Kingsley: And he began to ask me for my opinions on how the software was working out for me and how we were using it at that point in time, this company we were using for. Pavement, we did pavement management systems. So we had specialized equipment that would drive [00:11:00] over roadways and would take photo, photography.

Kingsley: Of the road conditions, and then we would take the photography and then put it into a database where we tracked the quality of the payment so that you could repair it at the optimum time. So anyway, Jack was interested. So that was that was kind of a fun thing. And that's early days of G. I. S. when Jack Jane Dorenda would actually answer the technical support line and talk to the customers.

Kingsley: Good

Kelly: luck trying to get that call nowadays.

Kingsley: Yeah, yeah. It kind of made me, it was kind of fun. It was this little team of people that, that, uh, you really got to know out there.

Kelly: Interesting. Very interesting. And they

Kingsley: used ESRI software because the Japanese company was the distributor of the ESRI software in Japan.

Kingsley: And so that's when I had this connection, um, with ESRI. And so that, that was a really, really good opportunity for me. [00:12:00]

Kelly: Yeah, especially when you get talked to Jack Dangerman.

Kingsley: Yeah. Do you want to insert a question? You want me to want me to go to the next job?

Kelly: No, I mean, I think that that's pretty interesting.

Kelly: I don't know if I can add to that 1. yeah, so so now you got a little bit of arc info doing some arcade. I'm sure some art plot for those that actually remember those days and, you know, it was. GIS back then was a little bit different on using, cause you really had to think out about how this is all going to work.

Kelly: And so, so you're using GIS for a little bit, and I guess then what kind of did opportunities come up or what made you kind of, I guess, move to the next, next step of your career.

Kingsley: So the next step in my career was cause we'd grown up in the mountain West. My wife and I, we. kind of got homesick after a while.

Kingsley: And so I picked up the same professional journal and looked at the back of all the names of the companies again. And this time I began calling them on the phone and having a year and a [00:13:00] half of GIS under my belt, calling them on the phone and, and, uh, they Would talk to me. They were enthused to speak to me.

Kingsley: In fact, they flew me out within two weeks and, uh, interviewed me and hired me within two weeks. And, uh, yeah, that was a company in, in central Idaho, uh, called power engineers. And they didn't have as many offices back then as they, as they then grew into, but that engineering firm, hired me and we moved within a month and a half out to Idaho to work at that second job, which was interesting in that those people were also, they had ESRI certified training.

Kingsley: They were also had some designation with ESRI. And so that's when they wanted to bring me on board to become a trainer. So they sent me out to do all the train the trainer courses. And I became a certified instructor. And this was back around [00:14:00] like 89, I think it was? That was 89, 90. Yeah. And, uh, so that kind of really allowed me to, to use my communication skills to, to train others.

Kingsley: And so we would set up the courses and train all the various agencies in, in Idaho and kind of the Mountain West areas, uh, to use GIS, as well as working on projects that, that dealt mostly with the utility and mining industry. Okay. So that was, that was a lot of fun. That was a glamorous for me because still GIS was so new that this, this place, they were growing fast enough that my cubicle was four times the size of everybody else's and that, that, yeah, because we had these large digitizing tablets, right?

Kingsley: In those days, you had to have your own massive table space and then you had to have the big computer space and then the map layout space. So that was, that was kind of a [00:15:00] fun feeling being in that company and because the GIS market was so brand new. Um, it was the, the vice president and the other heavy marketers that would then kind of buddied up with me and they would fly me to all of their, their trips down to Texas, over to California, up to the state of Washington, into the Midwest, even they'd fly me out to these places, uh, because I could do the GIS presentation because they were trying to sell this new business line.

Kingsley: To kind of add on to all the engineering work they were doing, you know, this idea that, that, Hey, we can now inventory your systems, track them better, map them better. So it was, it was pretty glamorous for me, uh, as this young guy being able to get on the company aircraft. I say company aircraft, you think you're allergic.

Kingsley: It's not. This is the central, central part of Idaho and every job is far away from the center part of Idaho. So they had this little, little [00:16:00] twin engine, uh, that they, they fired up and would take you on and you'd fly for hours trying to get to all still

Kelly: company plane.

Kingsley: That was coming, but otherwise they'd send you commercial.

Kingsley: So

Kelly: that's cool. So, so while you were there, did you. How did your GIS skills, did you take any additional courses? Did you, were you kind of just learning as you were going along? Was it kind of like up to you to learn any new skills?

Kingsley: It was, it was really at that point in time, you, you could, and you'd have the manuals all open and you just kind of comb through reading the manuals.

Kingsley: And I was supposed to begin to, to program. We're trying to make our own little system using a programming language called, uh,

Kelly: AML. So you were doing ArcView then?

Kingsley: Yeah. Uh, yeah. ArcView just barely come out and, but ArcView was just barely moving on. And I don't think ArcView, no, excuse me. It was PC ArcInfo that had just barely launched, PC ArcInfo not.

Kingsley: And so use that programming language, [00:17:00] which was. Yeah, maybe Avenue, maybe AML. It was SML. I think it was SML. That's it. Thank you. So I programmed an SML, this kind of mining utilities, inventory, and system where you could type in a number and it could take you to that particular, a power pole or, or whatever it was.

Kingsley: Or something like that. So again, those built on interfaces really weren't there yet. And so we were programming our own, which was, has its big disadvantages in that it's only as good as the code it's, and the code gets outdated and the software gets outdated. So, so it's, it's, it's a better world now where you can buy these larger systems where people take care of it for you.

Kelly: That's very true. So you were doing some, some, uh, coding at the time, some programming in SML. Had you done a lot of coding before that, or where did you kind of get into doing the coding for GIS?

Kingsley: Yeah, so the geography degrees in my department were not requiring any sort of coding, [00:18:00] coding, um, classes. It just wasn't a thing they didn't know.

Kingsley: And so I picked up coding in high school and, uh, as well as in college, I took a couple of courses. I took a couple of C programming courses as well as I think I had a Uh, Pascal programming and so when I was in New Jersey, uh, with this pavement management system, we also had to begin to code those. We had this had to code and interface, uh, to go work with the way we view the film.

Kingsley: It's called a film motion analyzer. And that coding was actually done in the basic language back then, because I was kind of prototyping it before they turned it off to the real thing. Coders. I was showing proof of concept and things like that. So that was, that was my background in coding that I kind of had to pick up on my own.

Kingsley: And, uh, like I said, the department wasn't taking care of me. They weren't telling me I needed it.[00:19:00]

Kelly: Who would need that programming skills? Yeah, exactly. Right. What is this GIS? Right. Uh, so, so you spent a little time at the, the engineering company there. Yeah. The powers engineers. And I guess, you know, was it time to kind of move along or looking for changing time zones again, or, yeah, you

Kingsley: know, it makes me this sounds like it's, you're, you're exploring my emotional social welfare, you know, my mental state.

Kingsley: So, at this point in time, right, there's the Iraq war had just begun. You know, Norman Schwarzkopf, uh, all on the news all the time talking at this invasion going on and things like that. And that kind of unsettled me a little bit. And the company was growing so fast that they had purchased, uh, another full service GIS company.

Kingsley: So when I was with them in this, this mountain town of Idaho, there was, I was kind of the GIS guy. So I was like a little bit of a zoo animal. People [00:20:00] on the tours, they made sure to show the GIS guy. Uh, they purchased this larger GIS company that had been doing GIS for water utilities out of Boise. And, uh, I was a little unsure of where my place would be there, kind of saying, we might move you to Boise and, uh, we might absorb you into that, that company.

Kingsley: And, uh, and so in that kind of, that kind of not being able to control my future kind of thing, I thought, well, let's try to control my future and, uh, let's maybe get some more schooling behind me because I'd finished school with just a bachelor's. And I thought, well, let's get a master's, um, and let's kind of, you know, target my way to, to, to some of the stuff I want to do.

Kingsley: And so I actually quit that job, filled with my own self importance and moved down to be close to family. And long story short, That was a period of unemployment for, or underemployment for [00:21:00] about a year and a half, because I went to those, those municipalities are beginning to use GIS and they weren't hiring cause they'd already got their GIS people.

Kingsley: Um, and trying to get into the university program. Uh, I tried to get a computer science. program. I tried to add that on, but without a with a bachelor's in geography, they didn't really think I had the skillset to handle a CS degree as a master's program. So they weren't letting me in.

Joining the Illinois State Water Survey
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Kingsley: And so after that period of underemployment, I was rescued by landing the job at the Illinois State Water Survey at the University of Illinois in Illinois.

Kingsley: And I got that job looking at the back advertisements of Journal of Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing because there was no internet yet. And so I, that's how I got my job and they fired me. Flew me out to Illinois and I spent 28 years loving that place.

Kelly: So about what timeframe did you get out there to water survey?

Kingsley: [00:22:00] I hired at the water survey in March of 93. Just in time for the floods of 93, the great Mississippi. Interesting time. Yeah. Interesting time. And, and so that, that was a great transition for me.

GIS Heaven: Working at the Water Survey
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Kingsley: I felt like I'd died and gone to GIS heaven when I, when I arrived at the water survey, because with the consultants that we're working for the engineering firm such GIS was so new that nobody had You couldn't get online to a data store and say, give me all the cemeteries.

Kingsley: Give me all the roads. You couldn't do that. Um, they just really weren't readily available. And so the, the engineering firm, when they took me to make their business presentations, they not only had to advertise their GIS services, but they had to Tell them how much it was going to cost to develop all their data.

Kingsley: And so what could have been a 100, 000 decision was really a 1, 000, 000 decision for these [00:23:00] large utilities because they didn't have the data yet. Um, so when I got to the State Water Survey, they had all the data. Because they had in the last couple of years prior to me coming, uh, they had had a federal contract that allowed them to develop the data sets for the entire state of Illinois.

Kingsley: It was called the long term mining project. Um, and that basically was for the state to build a database. So they could decide it was lands unsuitable for mining program. Excuse me. They could build the database so that they could determine which sites were most unsuitable for mining. So they could easily check it when somebody put in a mining permit.

Kingsley: So the state also federal funds, predominantly probably state funds with a host of partnered agencies, all the other scientific surveys, like the geography, geology, geology survey, and the natural history survey in the state museum, we all developed this [00:24:00] baseline data of digitizing the floodplain boundaries or digitizing the, uh, you know, the, uh, The rock formations from the geology side or the cultural resources, um, that was this data set was already there.

Kingsley: And it was just a delight to suddenly be able to make the maps from real data. And, uh, it was, it was pretty impressive. So it was GIS heaven. I died and gone to GIS heaven.

Kelly: So what was the main GIS software you're using at that time?

Kingsley: So at that time they had a contract with the SRI. So that was, uh, Arc info.

Kingsley: There was no PCs yet there. So we were using these, uh, Sun Microsystem machines. They looked like the newer ones look like little pizza boxes. Uh, the older ones didn't with a hard drives that cost hard drives. That whole had a whole 500 [00:25:00] megabytes, you know, 500 megabyte hard drive. That was an external hard drive that they probably paid 10, 000 for to work with these.

Kingsley: But it was, it was interesting because in that environment, it was a, It was my first networked environment. So in other words, it was kind of cool because you could send messages to the person using the Unix machine that was in the other room. You could, you know, send it at the command line. You could message him to come because it's all still one kind of one screen.

Kingsley: Actually, once we got in the microstation days, you had multiple screens. So they'd begun to introduce the windowing environment, the Sun Microsystems environment. Boy, it's just. It was wonderful. It was a wonderful era. It was, it was, it was exciting and new.

Kelly: So you're there, you're working on Unix machines.

Advancements in GIS Technology and Data Sharing
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Kelly: Doing arc info at some point in time, you know, it comes in, did you guys ever start using, you started [00:26:00] moving towards Arcview and I know you did 'cause you were talked about the, your instructor time there.

Kingsley: So, yeah, so it Arcview did come out and that was kind of cool because, but Arcview was still in that Unix environment.

Kingsley: It was a little bit later when, when they, when the, when ARC info finally migrated to the. The NT environment or the, which is the, the windows NT. Yeah. The windows NT. So we're, we're now using ArcView, um, and I'm beginning to teach classes on it. I'm teaching the others, other people, the scientists and such that work at the water survey and beginning to also, I, I think I extended my, my certification to be a, an arc.

Kingsley: View instructor. Um, so I was also teaching others, the larger community. In the early years, I threw an agreement with my, my employer. They allowed me to do courses that involve people outside the university environment. So I did [00:27:00] courses at, uh, Western Illinois. And, and, and I remember doing a couple of courses spread out across the state, Chicago and such.

Kingsley: And that allowed me to, you know, kind of stretch my wings in broadening the GIS community, uh, because GIS was growing. It was, it was at that point, everybody was needing a GIS and honestly working for the scientific surveys, it was kind of the hub for, for GIS because we had probably the largest concentration of users.

Kingsley: In the state at that point in time, we were with ESRI. We were customer number 27. Uh, that's how far it goes back. And, uh, years later, ESRI, I tried to give us another customer number, but all of his old people refused to ever use it in any of our, any, they call up the technical support and say, what customer are you?

Kingsley: It's like 27. They said, this shouldn't be that it should be like a seven digit number. It's like, no, it's 27. Like

Kelly: a badge of honor there. It

Kingsley: was. [00:28:00] And it was, it was, uh, it was a hub. It was a hub of this GIS data from the water survey standpoint. We're doing things which included digitizing all the floodplain boundaries off of the paper maps.

Kingsley: And, uh, so that was our contribution and, and we would get phone calls from various entities who, who'd heard we did GIS that didn't know GIS well enough that when they made a request, they'd say, well, give me everything, everything in GIS that you've got. And, and in those days you, they were on a metal tape, a nine track tape that, uh, you'd actually have to transfer the data at that point in time.

Kingsley: So you'd record this tape, you'd send it out and they would, Then receive it from you and, and they wouldn't talk to you for a while because they were too embarrassed to tell you that they didn't know what to do with what you've just given them. And so you, so that led to the time savings, uh, [00:29:00] opportunity for the scientific surveys to say, you know, we're a little bit tired of sending these things out.

Kingsley: We can actually purchase now a CD burner. A CD burner was coming out like 12, 000 or something like that. Purchase a CD burner and we can burn CDs and send it to these people so that we could deal with these phone calls faster. We didn't have to interview him a little bit more. We'd say, you know, we'll send you everything we got.

Kingsley: And so part of this, uh, This group with a scientific service, we got together and we assemble all the data that we developed and we put it on the CD and we became the first state in the nation to make public available. Statewide data sets that we would just send to people when they requested it. It was all, it was, it was all agencies that did this, that wanted it from us.

Kingsley: It was new enough that, that not many other people, uh, were using GIS, no personal people doing it for [00:30:00] themselves. And so we were able to cut this, this statewide data set and begin to send it out, and then we revised it again about a year and a half later, uh, to fix some of our mistakes or increase the, So that was a, that was a pretty cool badge of honor that we could wear to, to, and carrying that forward, then the internet net becomes available and we become the first state to have the statewide clearinghouse.

Kingsley: First state of the nation. It was basically just the same data sets that we had.

Kelly: Which is a great, great clearinghouse for GIS data.

Kingsley: It is, makes it available to everybody. It kind of takes you away from that million dollar part of the hundred thousand dollar GIS decision. You can get rolling already. Um, and it, my understanding now is you probably really don't need to go to the state clearinghouse anymore.

Kingsley: Some of the larger clearinghouses are handling. I still go to it. Oh, very good. Excellent. Excellent.

GIS Community in Illinois: A Historical Perspective
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Kingsley: Again, those were [00:31:00] wonderful, dedicated people that came together with a forward looking mind because they had to see the future and they had to decide that this is what they wanted to do. Because when you're the first out there, you hear rumblings that it'd be a good idea, but it takes some organization and some leadership, uh, which came out of this, which came, which dwelt in Illinois, uh, for, for launching that kind of thing.

Kelly: And especially around U of I, you know, that, that makes a lot of sense there too.

Kingsley: Yeah, it was, I would say the, at that community in that point in time with this, this group that was developing the CD, there were probably a good 30 GIS users, which made us again, uh, 30 to 50, maybe, uh, uh, the highest concentration of GIS use in state of Illinois.

Kingsley: One of the highest in the nation.

Kelly: Wow.

The Rise of GIS in the 90s
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Kelly: So you kind of got, uh, a little bit of GIS going on there now and you've done So I think, you know, for me, if I look back at that timeframe, The early [00:32:00] nineties to late nineties, there was a huge change in the GIS industry. To me, that's when it really started exploding because now we start getting PC.

Kelly: Exactly. Right. That really opened it up. And you know, you probably started having to support more users because now more people had access to that and. I guess, did you experience that there at the water survey as well, having to support the broader audience?

Supporting the GIS Community with CDs
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Kingsley: So the CD really took a load off of that because that became our answer.

Kingsley: That became our answer. Just take the CD, see what you think of it, we'll answer your questions. And so our support, though, turned towards leadership in the larger community. So we became core members of the professional organizations. which later turned into logistics and some of these others. So we became very strong supporters and sponsors serving in initial leadership, [00:33:00] doing conference planning and things like that in order to, that's kind of how we spread the knowledge, spread the assistance and the support.

Kingsley: Um, and we're happy to lend our advice wherever we could. But as far as having more phone calls, uh, the CD really took a lot of the A lot of the pain and suffering out of having to answer the support requests.

Kelly: So they can just request that CD and what they want.

Kingsley: Yeah, they didn't really think of us as as necessarily that the people who had to train them on it.

Kingsley: But again, we could we could do that through through our supporting of these. These industry organizations, and I, and I had the training business on the side too, that I just did a little bit of that too, until I got tired of training on the side. I had a change in leadership that basically said, we don't want you training outside anymore.

Kingsley: And I went, okay, well, let me, Poison the market, let me, let me put a poison pill in the market. So I started, so I started training the larger GIS community for the cost of manuals and so it undercut, it undercut the profit margins for any [00:34:00] sort of professional training and I just trained them as they came and just had class after class after class in it, um, on the campus and places.

Kelly: That's awesome.

Transition to Teaching and Training
---

Kelly: Yeah, so I'm assuming you, you still, you enjoyed that training.

Kingsley: I did. I enjoyed that training pace later on. I, I could teach courses at the university. I taught in there online, um, master's program for natural resources. I taught. taught the intro and advanced GIS courses. But that was just in the last five years of my, my career there.

Kingsley: So the last seven years I've been teaching there. Yeah, I did. I did enjoy that. That's, that's where you get to still see the magic because people are kind of opening their eyes to like, Whoa, the software can do that. And it allows you to bridge into them because some people are kind of outsiders to it.

Kingsley: Like, Oh, I don't, I just need to understand it. I don't need it as a tool, but once they get into it, there's some enthusiasm for drawing a map. For being able to, I guess everybody [00:35:00] gets that now because they have these Google maps and things like that,

Kelly: right?

Kingsley: They get that now. So if everybody kind of think of the excitement or the, or the naturalness of that, that's what you had to, to have a GIS course to do before.

Kingsley: Right.

Kelly: And the fact that it was their data or they learn how that all came together, understand the whole layering and stuff. So I can see that. Yeah, it's very. Very eye opening for a lot of people.

Switching from Unix to Windows NT
---

Kelly: So while you're at the water survey too, so you started off in the Unix environment. Did you guys eventually switch over to the windows NT or the PC side?

Kelly: And how did that go?

Kingsley: Yeah, eventually at the end it transitioned slowly because the NT environment was still wasn't as powerful and the software written for the NT still had, had some quirkiness associated with it. So, uh, it, it, it gradually went out. It, but then, and then it went completely away. I think it probably came along the lines when the new software purchases were required.

Kingsley: And [00:36:00] as the community grew, uh, the NT kind of spread it throughout even more people. So I, I would guess if I could make a bad guess, I would say that we were probably off of the Unix environment by the year 2000, probably off by maybe by 98.

Kelly: Cause that's about the time computers started becoming a little bit more secure.

Kelly: Cost effective memory was increasing hard drive or become a little bit cheaper and more people were able to access that kind of hardware to get the software to run. That's when I think, you know, somewhere around around that time frame around 2000. also is when as we switched over to the new arc info where, you know, it's kind of the.

Kelly: What people were more accustomed to having ArcMap, ArcCatalog, and ArcToolbox combined together. That's when they've kind of made that transition time. The whole software environment kind of changed a bit.

Kingsley: They made it friendly. Yeah.

Kelly: [00:37:00] Yeah.

Groundbreaking GIS Projects
---

Kelly: And so, you know, looking back at your time on WaterSurvey, what was probably some of the more interesting projects you got to use GIS technology and And that it really, you found that it helped

Kingsley: as you know, being an old guy, we speak with excitement and enthusiasm about people nowadays who'd say, really, we do that naturally.

Kingsley: Now we do that easily now. So one of the, one of the projects, which was, which was groundbreaking was, um, the, the USGS had finally scanned all of their, their topographic maps. So the paper maps, they were scanned. And the computer systems were now beginning to allow you to display something in the background.

Kingsley: You can now make a map. These are

Kelly: the DRGs. The

Kingsley: DRGs, yeah. The raster graphics. You can actually display them in the background of your maps. You couldn't do that initially. It was all lines, points, polygons. You plotted things out on a pen plotter. There was no sort of nice [00:38:00] photographic background that was happening in these things.

Kingsley: So these started coming out. Well, the USGS's release of these was Not completely there. They left all the borders on all of the DRGs. So we, so that didn't make them useful to display next to each other. So that's the value. Yeah, we got these collars overlapping collars. So, so before they had done it, um, we said, you know what, this is going to be a useful project for product for us to display in the background.

Kingsley: So we undertook the project to. To, uh, snip all of them. And that was the sec, I think the second release of the, of the statewide data sets included to our, our snipped version of all of these, these DRGs, so that you could display 'em side by side. And what we did with this is we took, um, the floodplain maps that we had digitized before the paper maps.

Kingsley: FEMA wasn't doing it yet. We were the ones who who did it. Um, and [00:39:00] we could display on top of these. DRGs. So now you see a topographic map that actually uses your, shows your flood zone. You know, that's a click of a button now, but that was, that was a massive project undertaking that you knew the people who digitize these maps panel after panel after panel for years, and now you can display them together.

Kingsley: And then, and then on top of that, what we had a project that was, that was inventorying all the, all the properties that had been flooded During the great Mississippi River floods of ninety three and so the government had paid for these buyouts. They bought these people to say, we're about your property.

Kingsley: Please move. We don't want this to happen again. So it's all the buyout properties and we were able to display these property boundaries with the floodplains on the D. R. G. to give you A reference because before you just did it, it wasn't as meaningful [00:40:00] for you to see it and then to make that even more consumable.

Kingsley: We took the extra step to turn it into an atlas because even though you could do this in G. I. S. Most of the people were not using G. I. S. So to give them a product that they could appreciate G. I. S. We made maps for all those individual communities. Uh, with an overview map with an index and we bound it and, uh, so as I don't know, 200 pages or something like that, we bound it and then we could give that to them as their atlas of, of buyout properties.

Kingsley: And that was exciting for me, 1, because it was a pretty cool product, but 2, it was the first one I got to run completely with. For myself, I was, and so at the university had the opportunity to hire student labor. And so I bulked up with student labor. We had about six, between four and eight students, uh, that were engaged in this project.

Kingsley: And it was, it was just such a fun, young, [00:41:00] enthusiastic environment. And some of those people that were part of that went on to some pretty good positions with their own companies and things like that in GIS. And, uh, it was, It was just a good environment because we believed in our, our product and we knew that everybody was giving us positive feedback every time they saw it.

Kingsley: So that was, that was exciting in a, in a way that maybe modern GISers can't appreciate, just

Kelly: the whole fact that you couldn't find GIS data back in the day. You know, that's, that's something that a lot of people don't get the same appreciation.

Kingsley: No, we didn't. It was a

Kelly: challenge back then.

Kingsley: You couldn't see, just think of the USGS quad maps.

Kingsley: We didn't have any of those things really in GIS. You didn't see the contour lines. You didn't see the roadways really. You didn't see the property boundaries when they had them or housing spots when you had them, hilltops. All those things are a background that make your maps more meaningful. And we had no background then.

Kingsley: Until those came along, you'd have to digitize them yourself to put a [00:42:00] house there or a mountain side. You had to digitize the mountain before that. Then the DRGs came, then you could actually stick them back there. It was wonderful.

Kelly: So when you went to the water server, did you start off as a GIS manager or was that kind of a new role?

Kelly: It

Kingsley: was, it was, um, I think GIS hotshot was kind of more of what it, what it was. It was, I was the GI, I had joined a group of GIS users. Um, so there's about five, there's about four, four of them, maybe five who were panel by panel digitizing the floodplain boundaries. So they had some, they had some redundant tasks that they knew how to use, and they were managed by an IT manager that had had GIS training, um, to do those kinds of things.

Kingsley: But I'm the, I was the first one who kind of came from the outside with a skill set that was, that could elevate the view that I could make customized maps of whether it be, uh, [00:43:00] weather sites and the isopleth maps that go along with those. I was, I was the first one that could begin doing those things. So I brought in a little bit higher in GIS, uh, just cause my background was a little bit more autonomous.

Kingsley: And working for places we're trying to sell a product. So I, that was kind of what I was, the GIS hotshot. And, uh, I never became the GIS manager until, um, 20, 20 years ago, 20 years ago. Until I, yeah. Yeah. Until about 20 years

Kelly: ago, maybe. Yeah. And then you became officially the GIS manager, right?

Kingsley: I did. I did.

Kingsley: And, but the big, and that's usually through attrition, right? That's through other people leaving and somebody being identified for it. And through organizations do different things. Like I decided they want a data coordinator and whether that is supposed to be superior to GIS or the GIS is on top of it.

Kingsley: Um, and, uh, and [00:44:00] so we actually hired an outside guy, uh, to, to be kind of a coordinator before I became the coordinator and his, and, uh, His skill set was more of a networking skill set, computer networking skill set. So my full blown GIS manager position, I think, came in when we began doing the FEMA maps.

Kingsley: It's 20 years ago. We started a project doing all the statewide maps for Illinois. The floodplains had been done before by us, but this time they were more engineering based. And they, we had skipped the, the incorporated areas. And so this time we were doing the incorporated areas. And they're supposed to be more into engineering base.

Kingsley: So for 20 years, the state water survey had this FEMA mapping project that they've been doing, and they still continue to do. So that's when in earnest, I became a GIS manager.

Kelly: And what kind of a shop? I mean, how many people was at the Illinois state water survey? Kind of like when you got [00:45:00] there and kind of when you left.

Kingsley: So when I got there, I'd say that, like I said, there was about four people, four to six people that were doing GIS. When I left just on that FEMA mapping project alone, there was 30. People that were probably, I'd say that's combined with the engineers. So I'd say of GIS people are probably 15 GIS people that were employed just by the water survey alone to do that project with other projects.

Kingsley: I'd probably put the whole group now of GIS people at that organization, maybe, uh, 25, and then they're part of the larger scientific survey community, and then part of the larger University of Illinois community. So there's, you know, 1000 people using GIS in the, in the university environment.

Kelly: So, when you had, you know, the proximity and relationship with the U of I area there.

Kelly: Finding new talent. Did you find most [00:46:00] of the students were they primarily like geography students, kind of, what did you see there?

Kingsley: You know, I, I'm just a side note. This is interesting. Um, cause we knew the larger GIS community and, uh, got to know some mentors and through, and I guess the long story short, I was very much more impressed with Illinois state universities, training of GIS people than the U of I, the U of I, That was an attitude.

Kingsley: The, the. I found that ISU wanted to train them so they can hit the ground running. U of I was still in this, in this conundrum of, we teach the, the theory behind it. And we're not trying to teach you specific, yeah, they would only let their lab managers, you know, help the students rather than the professors weren't really doing it so much in those early days.

Kingsley: So, and those are, but there was talent coming out of these various, various places that we were hiring. U of I was, when we got a U of I student, we've kind of trained him from scratch. [00:47:00] Sometimes we would, we would work through work study, which, um, because we, it's like, you know, I got a redundant task. I can train them to do this.

Kingsley: They're going to be digitizing contour lines. I, I can train them and I'll tell you some side benefits of doing the work study, the work study, not only saved us money because they're getting federal grant for, so basically half their salary is paid by the federal government. The other half is paid by us.

Kingsley: But the other benefit was, uh, diversity. I saw more, um, more diversity in ethnicities and racial diversity through work study than I saw through the geography department. So I, I, I was really touched when I had a couple of people that made careers out of it. They didn't have, you know, they came to the university, they were studying something completely different and this was their work study job and they just found it was such a wonderful thing to work with in an open [00:48:00] environment that they were able to, you know, to join the community.

Kingsley: So that was the benefit was adding the diversity to the GIS environment through through work study, as opposed to the traditional channels of just geography department. So, interesting side note.

Kelly: Wow. It is kind of interesting. So, you got 30 people, you got 28 years doing little GIS. You probably saw GIS change a lot over the years.

Evolution of GIS Data and Technology
---

Kelly: What would you probably say was some of the more interesting changes from when you first started doing GIS, even if it was at the The water survey to kind of when you left the water survey, what kind of was the more significant changes that you saw in G. I. S.

Kingsley: So the significant changes were the increasing the increase of base map data.

Kingsley: So, the base data that you can display, they give people reference to what you're trying to highlight. And so that included not only increasing number of data sets, but also. The imagery came along. So now we could display imagery. We couldn't at first, but then we could begin to display imagery, uh, in the [00:49:00] background of our maps.

Kingsley: And, uh, so that is, is a basic fundamental change that makes maps more popular. The other thing that, that happens is with the internet, the internet now that fueled GIS's development to where now everybody's got their own navigation in their palm, they got it in their cars. The internet was a thing that really, I think, moved that forward.

Kingsley: We used to go to GIS conference or conferences, like we would go to a conference in Peoria, the, the clean water celebration. And I used to pack up my big, my big, uh, Spark microsystem computer with this big monitor. And we'd haul it on, we'd haul it on a dolly and we'd set it up a booth and we'd have high school students come around.

Kingsley: And we'd say, tell me where you live, what town and, and we type it in where they live and they would see this spot imagery come in the background. It's like, Oh my [00:50:00] goodness, that's over by my house. And then we would bring up the, the census Bureau lines, right? They're probably called dime back then. We bring them up of the, the, the blocks, the blocks.

Kingsley: And we basically say, is this your block? Yeah, that's my block. And then we do the, Extraordinary thing. I'm actually clicking on one of those, one of those blocks. And we'd say, this shows how many people live on your block. This tells you their, their ages. It tells you their racial identity. It tells you all of these things.

Kingsley: And they kind of say, That's my block. It was just such a shocker to him to be able to do that. Now it's nothing right now. You just kind of all zoom in. Right. I'll click on it. Hop on the internet. Yeah. Yeah. But that's, that's, that's a remarkable change with those datasets coming along. That, that was just so eyeopening.

Kingsley: Some of the other changes that I saw along the way was business lines began to come aboard. [00:51:00] So, like, facilities management came aboard later in the game. The 1st to see from the standpoint, as the name implies, environmental is the E. and so from them, they were kind of larger mapping units, not necessarily caring about roads, not necessarily caring about power lines and things like that.

Kingsley: And so I saw the industry began to tailor themselves more towards that. That line. So those big changes we're seeing now to say that, that's kind of a little bit of ESRI's history because places like Intergraph, those kinds of companies were into those, that facilities management before the ESRI. Just kind of

Kelly: more engineering folks.

Kelly: They're more

Kingsley: engineering folks. And ESRI had to evolve from a environmental focus. And then they began to invite all the engineering and facilities managers on board reluctantly, in my opinion, because they had to change, they had to change from their data model. In order to appease these people, it had to come from something that was a topology where you're interested in, in where [00:52:00] things were in relationship to it, to where now you had to do a rule based software.

Kingsley: So they had to switch it to where all the lines had rules. Where previously they just had a relationship. Now they had to have rules in order so that you could track to say, transformers have to be connected to poles and poles have to be connected to, you know, the transmission lines that was a demand of that industry.

Kingsley: So yes, or I, in my opinion, had to switch and play catch up. And beginning to change to that rule based data model.

New Beginnings in Okinawa
---

Kelly: So you're at the water survey, you get about 28 years and I guess you retire there and then it's time to kind of look for new opportunities. Give us a little bit of idea. What are you doing these days?

Kingsley: So I'm on a different time zone from you, right? I've been watching the sunrise. This time of day, I am, I'm working on a Marine Corps base in Okinawa, Japan.

Kelly: Marine Corps helping them out now, huh?

Kingsley: Yeah, the Marine Corps. So my duties here, I work in a facilities [00:53:00] management group. So basically we're inventorying, uh, keeping up with the inventory of the buildings and the power lines and the transmission lines and things like that.

Kingsley: And as far as feeling like I can make a difference here, some of the exciting work that I feel like I can contribute to is within long large organizations, there's always a need to build bridges. So, 1 of the things that I feel good about is with a small team here, we were able to, to build a functioning viewer, a map viewer for planning, which allows people to see where upcoming plan, upcoming building projects are happening and where, you know, they're going to need the space to lay down the materials or when Disposing of buildings and things like that.

Kingsley: And that is very helpful for, for organizations who might be siloed to communicate with one another. And so that, that, that goes far. I feel pretty good about that project. It was something you think should have been done earlier, but hadn't been done as successfully earlier. The reason why that's important is, is infrastructure always needs to release or [00:54:00] replaced.

Kingsley: But in the case of, of the basis here in, in Japan, there's a couple of things pushing it. One is our, our posture towards. The enemies, which North Korea is the neighbor of Japan and China is on our doorstep with Taiwan. I'm actually closer to Taiwan than I am to Tokyo, where we're at on this island. So with those changes, there's changes in the basis footprint.

Kingsley: The biggest one though is, is with, uh, agreement with the government of Japan. They're trying to shrink the footprint of the bases to give more land back to the Japanese government. And so to do that, they need to remove all the buildings that are going to be in those land return areas and build them again in the remaining portions of the base.

Kingsley: So, you go from, you go from spread out parking lots to parking garages in order to accommodate some of these [00:55:00] squishing in with, with all these functions on the smaller base footprints. Another project that, uh, that has been in, I've enthusiastically been involved is, um, acquiring imagery using the small handheld drones, this, that's a fixed wing, not the quadcopters, but a fixed wing allows you to stay in the air for longer and allows you to get, collect imagery that can be pasted together.

Kingsley: Uh, that's again for, not for any sort of, any sort of. Tip of the spear kind of process. It's more for, uh, just here's our new building that we're building and here's what it looks like. And here's some updated imagery at a higher resolution. And so that's exciting to be able to use a fixed wing drone and to process it in software where you can make these 3d products as well as 2d products.

Kelly: Cool. Yeah. Yeah. So, and I think it's interesting to let the listeners know is [00:56:00] you're, you're in And I guess this works out really good because. For way back in the day, you actually learned Japanese.

Kingsley: Yeah. So that's like, it's like a bookends for my career, possibly, I'll probably still keep working after this, but, uh, but I started my career working with a Japanese company, speaking Japanese in my business meetings, um, with them.

Kingsley: And then I've come back to the end and, and that's, that's by, that's by plan. I really. I wanted to get back to the enjoyment that I had the first time. First time here. I had not only loved first time I was here, I was actually a missionary. And so I got to be right with the people and in this positive volunteer environment where.

Kingsley: It just felt so good that it's like, uh, as I get kind of, as I got late career, I thought, you know what, with going through COVID and such, it's like, I, I could use a taste of the good old days and get back together with the Japanese people. So [00:57:00] I didn't retire from the university. I had enough, enough years in that, that I could qualify for retirement.

Kingsley: I just wanted to let it sit and bake and get bigger for a little while. And so I, It found a job through USA jobs with the federal government working as a cartographer and they moved me to Japan and uh, They give me this wonderful environment. My wife also works here. She got a job as a second grade teacher on one of the base schools.

Kingsley: And, uh, I guess if I can get back to a little bit of the motivation here too, everybody went through COVID and, uh, university tried to depopulate their campus by telling everybody to go home and work remotely and I'm, I prefer to, to be in an office environment. And so that kind of made me think, it's like, how long is this going to last?

Kingsley: And, uh, I had actually just coming into COVID, I'd actually had. Airline [00:58:00] tickets to go to Tokyo, finally returned to Japan after almost 40 years, finally get back from my vacation and COVID shut down, shut things down. I would be able to fly. But when I returned back to the university, they would. They would quarantine me for a month before I, I could go to participate with them and things like that.

Kingsley: So that canceled that trip. And I guess the consolation prize for me was getting a job, uh, nine months later where you can't stop the U. S. military. They had a treaty agreement. So the only people, the only Americans getting into Japan were U. S. military involved people that were coming on our own flights and landing on our islands.

Kingsley: And we were quarantining. On at the hotel on, on base, uh, or our homes, if we'd had them yet, I didn't have a home yet. And then I was able to then go into my, my work day working with human beings who are wearing masks or such. So that was got back to [00:59:00] Japan.

Kelly: Interesting. Well, Kingsley, I know we've covered quite a ground, a lot of ground here.

Kelly: I

Kingsley: don't know how much was useful, but

Kelly: very much. It was very interesting. Very, very interesting to listen to this.

Advice for Aspiring GIS Professionals
---

Kelly: So 1 last thing I'd like to for for those new students are looking to start this career. Some of those that are already starting their careers. What kind of, do you have any like an advice that you'd like to share with them, you know, things that, that, you know, you should study this or look at this, you know, anything that you might have to, to share with them.

Kingsley: It might still be outdated though. Even what I'm saying, I used to say a few years ago that you just got to really build your programming skills. You got to build your programming and network skills and, uh, use kind of the enterprise environment as opposed to just the mapping skills because you're going to find yourself, uh, more marketable.

Kingsley: You're going to find yourself also climbing up the career ladder a little bit faster. So those skills are, are pretty important. Years ago, you know, decades ago with the trajectory of GIS [01:00:00] into the public environment, I always wondered whether GIS would exist as a career in the future. And so I always thought, you know what, if I were to tell somebody, I'd say, don't go into GIS, but I don't know if that applies anymore.

Kingsley: If it's still a budding career, I I'd say that's fantastic. Just kind of hang it on with another skillset because yeah, hanging on to another skillset so that you can, you'll, you'll feel more fulfilled. You'll feel more fulfilled being able to integrate GIS to whatever environment that you're professionally working in.

Kingsley: You just as well not be isolated.

Kelly: I think that's good advice and I agree with it wholeheartedly. Good. Well, I really appreciate your time.

Conclusion and Farewell
---

Kelly: I appreciate you being on this podcast. Like I said, very interesting story, and I look forward to talking with you more in the near future. We won't wait so long this time.

Kelly: It's been a while since [01:01:00] we talked and a lot changes in that amount of time. So again, I do appreciate your time on here and look forward to seeing you again.

Kingsley: My pleasure. Anytime.

Kelly: All right. We'll talk to you later Kingsley. Okay. Thank you. Thanks for joining us on the Spatial Connection.

Kelly: If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review the podcast on your favorite platform. You can also follow us on social media or visit our website for updates, resources, and behind the scenes content. Do you know someone with a fascinating geospatial story? If so, send us a message.

Kelly: We'd love to hear about them. Until next time, stay curious, stay connected, and keep exploring the world through the lens of geospatial technology.