UCGIS I-GUIDE Community Champions expand the community reach of I-GUIDE.  They participate directly with I-GUIDE's activities and contribute to outreach as we pursue a range of broad impacts. The vision is that these individuals would each propose to work on a small-scale project of their own design that would align with that year's proposed I-GUIDE focal areas. For Year 1 of the project (October 1, 2021 - September 30, 2022), the focus of the Community Champions’ work will have direct relevance for the synergistic activities between the UCGIS GIS&T Body of Knowledge and its applications for workforce and professional development emerging from I-GUIDE activities with spatial data science.

Gesospatial data, technologies, and services are now critical parts of the policy making and policy evaluation process. Through the United States' spatial data infrastructure, policy makers, state and federal agencies, and non-governmental partners access and use these assets to pursue their agency objectives. As the national spatial data infrastructure evolves, it must be evaluated and reshaped to create continued progress. As it grows I-GUIDE will become a part of the national spatial data infrastructure. During this project, I will collaborate with the I-GUIDE community to assess the institute's development and create processes and tools to promote effective knowledge exchange with the policy community.

Geospatial data-intensive sciences revolve around gathering, mining, and sharing geospatial data. However, these activities have sparked widespread public concern about compromising individual privacy. The purpose of this project is to contribute to ethical geospatial data handling by developing educational materials about location privacy and related topics. During my project, I developed two Jupyter notebooks that connected to new and existing topics in the GIS&T Body of Knowledge that focus on location privacy protection and privacy-preserving data visualization. These included 2020 Census and Differential Privacy and Geomasking Sensitive Individual-Level Data to Protect Location Privacy.  Both of these Jupyter notebooks are available as Open Educational Resources once you login to the CyberGISX Platform.

CyberGIS represents a complex geospatial system that connects many interdisciplinary fields by combining advanced computing and cyberinfrastructure, GIS, and spatial analysis and modeling capabilities. The Geographic Information Science & Technology Body of Knowledge (GIS&T BoK) aims to maintain a comprehensive collection of topics for the domain, but the technological advances, the concepts, skills, and practices required to utilize CyberGIS are not well defined in the GIS&T BoK and there is a disconnect between the topics currently included (most often identified by educators) and the challenges that students have faced when implementing CyberGIS. During my project, I will be comparing was has been identified as key topics of CyberGIS via the BOK and other CyberGIS publications with what can be gleaned as high value, popular, or "actually useful" according to various web-based GIS thread discussions.