This is a start for several things - The website, the blog, and the expected dialog with those interested in our offerings and responsibilities. 

Our website has been a long time in the making.  It had been promised quite awhile back and I know some have expected something quicker. 

This is actually the fourth Website our office has put up.  It feels great to have offered up the hosting fees, and to have created those other sites, but we’re glad we’ve finally gotten to our goal for these GIO pages, and finally have it up and running. 

The first site we built came out of a desire to contribute to the Wisconsin flooding recovery.  There were no geospatial activities tied to recovery, but we saw an opportunity to assist.  Recognizing the difficulty this federal, state and local collective of agencies would have in communicating and coordinating effectively solely through the email lists that were being set up, I offered our services to build a collaboration site containing calendars, document repositories, and forums for each of those action areas.  (rtf.wi.gov) 

 Second, and much more challenging than anyone expected, we created the site we hope will make Network collaboration with the Wisconsin Geographic Information Council a very fruitful and productive process.  It was certainly interesting, but getting this particular site out of the gate took quite a bit of time.  We discovered the hard way that it is a long, long process - Designing a Website by committee.  The work will have been well worth the effort if the WIGICC/Network relationships needed for our sucessses bloom and grow from this. (wigicc.org) 

 Third, we helped to migrate the State Agency Coordination team’s web work into a more flexible format.  This was mostly work to migrate existing content to a new look, feel, and address. Since their site had been a subset of what was the former GIO web address, this now also offers them better content control and autonomy.  (sagic.wi.gov) 

 Each of these efforts was a valuable learning experience.  Compared to the first two, we put ours together, from scratch, and relatively quickly.  I know the content also reflects that right now, but this will grow.  That is what comes next, and that is what we look forward to showing.  I hope our site will make our work and communication more open and accessible.  Although it hasn’t been published anywhere up to this point, we have actually been quite busy and I am very proud of our work. 

Next post, I’ll list some other achievements and goals (beside websites).
I titled this post ‘Here We Go’; the next will be titled ‘Here We Show’.