6 posts tagged with "Workflows"

A good GIS workshop can make everything look easy. The trainer has the right software, the example data is clean, the projector works and somebody has already solved every problem the participants are about to encounter. For a few hours the whole thing feels manageable. Then Monday morning arrives and the participant opens their own computer to discover a different version of the software, messy data, missing permissions, six spellings of the same place and an organisation already asking when the finished map will be ready.

That gap between a successful workshop and useful capability has shaped a great deal of the Māori GIS work I have been involved with. Over time it also changed how I thought about what a wānanga was for. The aim was not simply to transfer a set of technical instructions from the expert to the participant. It was to create enough understanding, confidence and connection that people could carry the mahi forward themselves.

The 2017 Indigenous Mapping Wānanga at Claudelands in Hamilton was built around modern mapping tools, practical training and a large collaborative programme. It also provided a very effective demonstration of something much less glamorous: the cloud only works if you can actually reach it. A large room full of participants and trainers opened web mapping applications, imagery and online services at roughly the same time. The venue Wi-Fi struggled, connections slowed and trainers began improvising.

It was frustrating at the time, but it remains one of the better lessons I have taken from years of GIS capability work. The problem was not simply technical. It exposed the difference between a technology being theoretically available and people having a realistic, reliable way to use it for their own kaupapa.

There was a period in Māori GIS when one of our answers to the problem of access was a box containing ten DVDs. At the time this did not seem particularly ridiculous. It seemed innovative. Professional GIS software was expensive, the data was large, internet connections were limited and many of the people who needed access to claimant mapping did not have a full GIS environment sitting on their desk. We wanted people to be able to explore more than a few finished maps, so we developed resource packages using ArcReader and prepared GIS content that could be distributed physically.

At one point the complete package occupied ten discs. The digital future therefore arrived in a cardboard box. What interests me now is not only how old the technology looks, but what problem we were actually trying to solve. The aim was to move more mapping capability closer to the people whose whenua, histories and claims were being represented, rather than leaving the useful GIS locked inside specialist offices.

One of the recurring problems with conferences is that they finish just as everybody is getting useful. For two or three days there is energy, conversation, practical demonstrations and people discovering that somebody else has already solved the problem they have been wrestling with for six months. Then everyone packs up, drives or flies home and returns to their own organisation, where Monday morning has been patiently waiting.

The history of Māori GIS over the last two decades is partly a history of finding ways to keep those connections alive after the event. Conferences mattered, but so did the things that appeared between them: practitioner networks, mailing lists, workshops, outreach sessions, online groups, Indigenous Mapping Wānanga and eventually regular Ngā Poutama Matawhenua sessions. The technology changed repeatedly. The underlying need did not. People wanted to find one another, learn from one another and get practical help when the real work started.

Over time I came to understand that the important infrastructure was not really the email list, website, Facebook group or webinar platform. It was whanaungatanga: the relationships between people who kept turning up, shared what they knew, introduced others, hosted events, answered questions and made space for newer practitioners. I do not use that word to claim that I was building Māori relationships according to tikanga. I use it because the ordinary technology language of “networking” does not adequately describe what I observed. The connections were not simply contacts in a database. They carried trust, reciprocity, history and obligations to one another.

That relational quality is one of the things that made the move from conferences toward wānanga important. A conference can transfer information. A wānanga can also create space for collective learning, questioning, kōrero and knowledge moving in more than one direction. The practical Māori GIS community gradually became less about one expert presenting to an audience and more about people bringing their own kaupapa, experience and questions into the room.

For a long time I thought the obvious measure of a GIS project was the thing it produced. A map was finished, a map book was printed, a database was delivered and a set of layers worked. Outputs are comforting because they can be counted, photographed and put into reports. Māori GIS work gradually taught me to ask a much less comfortable question: what happens after the mapper leaves?

That question changed almost everything. A map can be excellent and still leave the people who need it dependent on the person who made it. A GIS can be technically sophisticated and still become useless when the one person who understands the folders moves on. A training event can be inspiring and still achieve almost nothing if the participant returns home and cannot reproduce what they saw. The real test of capability is not whether the system works while the expert is standing beside it. It is whether the work can continue afterwards, under the authority of the people who need it and in a form that can be carried forward.

Over time I came to see that this was more than a sustainability problem in the usual project-management sense. In Māori settings there was often an intergenerational dimension to the work. Whenua, place names, histories and community information were not temporary project assets. People might be using them for a Treaty claim today, environmental planning tomorrow and something quite different in ten or twenty years. The question was therefore not only whether the system survived the funding period, but whether knowledge, context and authority could survive changes in staff, software and organisations.

I am not Māori and do not claim a Māori worldview as my own. What I can describe is what working alongside Māori practitioners and communities taught me about capability. The strongest projects were not simply those that delivered technology. They were the ones that increased rangatiratanga over the work, reduced avoidable dependence and left people better able to make their own decisions about their information.

Downloading a historical aerial photograph is only the first step. To compare it meaningfully with current information, the scan often needs to be connected back to place. That sounds like a technical problem, but georeferencing is also an act of interpretation. We are taking an image captured at one time, often for a survey purpose, and relating it to a present-day coordinate system and landscape that may have changed substantially since the photograph was taken.

For Māori GIS that distinction matters. The goal is not to make an old photograph submit neatly to the modern map. Awa may have moved, coastlines may have changed, roads may have been built and landforms altered. A photograph can help reconnect records and memories to whenua, but its position, its meaning and the conclusions drawn from it still need to be checked against other evidence and, where relevant, the people who know the place.

This older workflow used Google Earth Pro's Image Overlay tool to align an image visually. It can still be useful for people who already have Google Earth Pro installed, but it should now be treated as a legacy exploratory method, not the recommended way to build a new repeatable workflow.