THE INTERVIEW
Five Questions for . . . John Calkins of ESRI

John Calkins is a familiar face to anyone who's attended the opening session of the ESRI User Conference. For the last nine years John has been one of the team leaders behind the company's demonstration of an enterprise application . . . the elaborate demonstration of ESRI technology, highlighting its use across many different applications and organizations. Some of the applications in past years have included a 3D ArcGlobe visualization of Mt. Everest, analyzing the social interactions of the Amboseli elephants, hurricane preparedness, response plans in Galveston, Texas, and multi-user GIS collaborations across Yellowstone National Park. John and the ESRI teams pull together the vision, hardware, software, and applications for what is often the most talked-about part of  opening day. John acts as a presenter of the story to the more than 12,000 users in attendance.

1. This is a big job. How many months in advance do you begin working on the demos? What's the first step in the process?

The ESRI User Conference is probably our most significant opportunity to expose our users to new technologies and software and receive their feedback. Because of this, we put forth considerable effort across the entire company to prepare for the conference. For many of us this begins about 2-3 months before the conference and then increases in intensity and effort all the way  through the conference.

For the larger "enterprise" demos we typically start by looking at the strategic directions of the technology and asking ourselves how would our users implement this? We then find a long-time ArcGIS user to help us with some of the brainstorming and data for the demo. The most important part is to make sure we are finding real applications for the technology. By meeting with the users and talking about what is important to them and their community, we can take the demonstration beyond "just a demo" and make it hit home, so that the audience can truly relate to what they are seeing. For me this is the most exciting and challenging part of the process-finding the compelling story and translating it into the architectural design of the demo.

2. How do you decide on the story for the demo? Is there a goal of integrating a specific set of products into the story? How many products and computers are typically involved?

The story for the demo evolves from our users. It is their real life experiences that, when combined with the new software, creates the message and demonstration. Sometimes we are just looking for a demonstration of one product and in this case the product does drive the demonstration. However, in a larger enterprise demonstration that focuses more on real world problems and solutions, we use the software the way our users would and focus on solving the problem.

How many computers? This is a difficult question. To support the entire opening plenary session, which could consist of more than twenty demonstrations, we may have twenty or more workstations, laptops, servers, and mobile hand-held devices, each showing a different computing platform, operating system, and addressing different user communities in the audience. If you have watched closely over the years, our stage size has grown to accommodate all of this equipment. In 1998, one single demonstration used three workstations and more than five different servers spread halfway across the United States. We were illustrating distributed computing across multiple organizations that work together in the greater Yellowstone area ecosystem.

Equally important to the computers we use on stage is the network. In today's world of distributed Web services, I think most people are realizing that you cannot have all the data locally in your database, so the Internet connection we have on stage is critical. Each year we rely more and more on real Web services to bring together all of the necessary data and knowledge. So during the plenary session we become best friends with our system administrators and IT network folks who monitor the network and ensure constant connectivity.

3. What's the most challenging part of the process?

Time, or really the limited amount of time we have to present all the new products every year. You would be amazed if you could see behind-the-scenes how we time every presentation with a stopwatch and look for any way to trim seconds off of a presentation. Many years ago, the plenary session ran more than one hour late and we said that we would never again let this happen. Now everyone who gets on stage has prepared their material down to the second and we have time clocks that are viewable only on stage, counting down the time remaining. So keeping the whole day on schedule when you have 12,000 people depending upon you is the biggest challenge.

I think the other challenge is to come up with new and improved ways to showcase the applications. The software evolves every year, which makes it easy to find new and exciting things to show, but we always strive to make the opening day bigger and better, which means taking advantage of all the creativity found throughout ESRI. For example, ESRI has its own graphics department, which not only designs the stage (and T-shirts), but is also a key group in helping us with innovative ways to present material. In 2003 for the keynote by Peter Hillary, who climbed Mt. Everest, we were able to introduce a new main stage screen that could be configured as one single continuous 80-foot wide screen, which truly made for a dramatic IMAX-like ArcGlobe 3D visualization. Using ArcGlobe, we gave the audience a breathtaking view by flying around Mt. Everest, revealing its beauty using high-resolution imagery draped on the terrain model combined with GIS data to show all the climbing routes up the mountain. I believe that this was the largest-ever GIS visualization in scope and perhaps content.

4. Have there been any serious mishaps during creation or presentation over the years?

Honestly, I don't think so. We suffer hardware failures occasionally like losing a disk drive. Just like our users, we always have to be thinking about multiple backups. Because we usually end up working very long hours during the final preparations, we also follow the rule that no one can delete any files after 10 p.m. at night, when people are tired. The chances of making a mistake are too great. This is probably a good rule for everyone.

It was also very scary in 1998 when we did a distributed ArcSDE connection from the conference in San Diego to Yellowstone National Park. Internet infrastructure at that point in time to remote locations like Mammoth, Wyoming, was, let's just say, less than ideal. I remember breathing a sigh of relief, that everyone in the audience probably heard, when I saw the connection actually retrieve the data and the wolf tracks were displayed on the map.

So far I guess we have been lucky and not had any serious mishaps. However, I don't think it is really luck as much as it is practice and hard work trying to make sure we cover every possible outcome.

5.Which of the demos was your favorite and why?

That is a really tough question because there have been so many interesting projects. The Amboseli Elephant Research Project and the Yellowstone Grizzly Bear Habitat demos were both incredibly interesting because we used GIS to help the scientists discover new spatial patterns in their data that they had not seen previously....so we were helping further their scientific research.

Our president, Jack Dangermond, always talks about "Making a Difference," and I think my absolute favorite demonstration was the year Lynne Thigpen from CBS's "The District" received the Making a Difference Award for her work to help educate millions of people around the world about GIS and crime analysis. It was an emotional experience and she made such a difference to our user community that it was a special year. After her keynote and our demo, I had the pleasure of watching hundreds of our users waiting in line to meet Lynne. The comment we heard the most was how Lynne's efforts helped explain GIS to our families and friends.

But, perhaps, my favorite demo will always be the new one we are building for the next User Conference.

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