Crossing Over

When I was in junior high school I'd spend some Saturday mornings lying on the dining room floor listening to Casey Kasem's American Top 40. Each week he'd "count them down." "Them" referred to the late 1970s "pop hits." Now and again Mr. Kasem would speak about a "crossover," meaning an "outsider" song, one from the R&B, Soul, or Country charts that had "invaded" the pure pop world. I'm not sure that I knew that "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue" was a country song or that "September" was also on the R&B chart. They were "good songs." Crossover hits, I now know, helped enrich pop music. Perhaps more importantly, many of those songs' ancestors from other genres gave rise to "Rock and Roll" and the pop I enjoyed.

We are entangled in several crossover situations in technology. At a recent conference, the General Manager of a GIS software and services organization in Romania asked me how to get his stories of GIS implementations into that country's version of E-Week. His underlying goal was to help the information technology sector in his country understand geospatial technology. He wanted to encourage crossover, to bring "outsider" technology to new audiences.

As I speak with those in our industry from all over the globe I hear a version of that question over and over again. "How do we get [insert audience here] to understand, appreciate, and/or fund what we do?" I'll suggest that the work of more and more of those employed in the geospatial arena now includes helping others understand the significance of our contributions in a variety of areas. We need to help management, investors, local, national, and global policy makers, and the public to understand the promise of the investment in hardware, software, people, applications, data, and research. We all, at some level, seek the same things: to ensure that geospatial technologies are used to their fullest extent in all possible application areas.

That, is at least part of the role of EOM. In the coming months you will see subtle changes that will reposition the magazine to serve both our community, and those communities we hope to educate, those into which we need to crossover. I am challenging authors to add a bit more context to articles to highlight the relevance of their topics to a larger world, one beyond the geospatially enamored "insiders." I'll be asking that they explain terms widely used in our community, but perhaps new to those in other circles. In short, EOM will grow to be a publication anyone can pick up, find interesting and learn from, in the best tradition of science and technology publications like New Scientist, published by GITC America's parent company, Reed Business Information.

There's one other group of people who I hope will find EOM of value: those who interact with geospatial professionals and "wonder what we do all day." I'm hopeful that in time you'll be able to hand the curious any copy of EOM and say, "this magazine is about what I do."

What I've outlined is both a vision and process. Your input in the form of comments, suggestions, and criticisms is most welcome as we embark on this journey. A simple way to provide feedback is to fill out our online survey, https://www.eomonline.com/survey. Please do so before July 30th to be entered into a drawing for several prizes. If you'd like to contribute to EOM, please have a look at our editorial guidelines posted on the website, or contact me directly.

Adena Schutzberg, Editor

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