00:01And good morning. One of my measures of a meeting like this is the rate at which my own thinking changes.

00:09And on that score, this meeting certainly has been a huge success so far.

00:13I have many take-away ideas from yesterday and hopefully I will today as well.

00:18So what I'm going to say effectively represents my thinking as of about 45 minutes ago.

00:25Welcome back to day 2.

00:28Day 2 we have essentially a similar format to day 1 as Diana already mentioned.

00:34But there is a distinctly different flavor to it.

00:37And I hope this message gets across very clearly.

00:40Because what we have to do today is to start thinking in terms not of the broad canvas...

00:46...but of particular actions and priorities.

00:49What is it that we can do?

00:51How as a community can we act and to what extent can we indeed create a community?

00:59And so we're hoping that the idea labs and...and as they're synthesized tomorrow in the presentations...

01:05...will be a set of very specific actions.

01:09And I say that because I think one of the things that I learned yesterday, and I was certainly aware of this before...

01:15...but it was brought on very, very clearly by Tom Fisher's presentation, is how urgent all of this is.

01:21Because Tom used the phrase fracture critical and whether we're talking about a fracture occurring on the San Andreas fault...

01:31...or a double-dip recession or some new disease pandemic.

01:38Whatever happens, it's quite clear is happening fast.

01:41And we must therefore devise actions that are equally rapid.

01:48In...in a sense, I think T. S. Elliott was wrong when he said, This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.

01:55It seemed clear to me from Tom's presentation yesterday that the world is going to end with a bang, not a whimper.

02:03I think we heard yesterday and certainly...we're certainly aware of this...

02:08...that the set of tools we have to solve these problems is increasing exponentially.

02:14There are some wonderful tools in 9.4.

02:16We already have some wonderful tools.

02:19An interest in GIS and awareness of GIS is also increasing exponentially.

02:25There are some problems that we are solving today.

02:31We have devised methods for addressing issues; for example, of land-use changes we saw yesterday.

02:36But the power of the tools can extend much further.

02:41And we are, I think, the community that can help extend the power of those tools...

02:47...to a set of issues much more like the kinds of issues Tom was talking about.

02:51Much of the evidence, much of the scientific knowledge on which those solutions will have to be based remains locked away.

02:59And GIS, I think, I've always thought, is one of the ways of releasing, implementing that knowledge, making it accessible.

03:08This...this community is the one that understands this and so that gives this community a particular responsibility.

03:16It's aware of the severity of the problem, and it's also aware of the power of the tools.

03:22So our task, I think, is somehow to bring these two together, how to connect the dots and to do it quickly because speed is of the essence.

03:30So I'm an academic and I represent what some people acknowledge is the second most conservative industry on the planet.

03:38The most conservative being classical opera.

03:43And at the same time, I have access to a younger generation of bright, intelligent, highly-motivated people...

03:55...the students that are currently in our universities and that will be the practitioners of tomorrow.

04:01How can we empower them?

04:02How can we enable them to take that enthusiasm and bring it to the solution of the kinds of problems we're talking about here?

04:11There are action items, I think, having to do with the tools.

04:14There are action items having to do with our education system, with our curriculum.

04:18There are all sorts of action items having to do with community which we can distill out of this meeting...

04:25...and bring tomorrow into some kind of synthesis.

04:30How do we convince people that these are the things that they should actively pursue with priority and also with speed?

04:41I'm reminded of several of the points in my own career when some meeting like this...

04:46...suddenly produced a whole series of opportunities and a real change in my own thinking.

04:51And one that many of us in the GIScience community recognize is the meeting in 1977 in Endicott House on topological data structures...

05:00...which led for many of us into the kind of GIS models that we...that we have today.

05:06Many similar meetings I've...I've experienced over the years.

05:10This could be such a meeting.

05:12This could be one of those meetings where a community forms and actions are taken and people follow up and...

05:20...one of the things that makes, I think, a meeting like this particularly important is the varied backgrounds of the people who come.

05:29What we have here is a stew of different backgrounds.

05:33We have the potential for enormous creative tension.

05:35We have people here talking to each other who've never traditionally talked to each other in the past.

05:41We have an opportunity here to break down stovepipes and to do the kinds of things that are necessary to move an agenda forward.

05:48So I think that we have here the right mix to...to devise some important priorities and actions.

05:55I think we should, therefore, seize the day.

05:58Let's carpe diem and let's make this the opportunity that I think it can be.