GeoDC on December 10th

Mark your calendar! The next GeoDC event will be held on Wednesday, December 10th, from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM at Sudhouse DC (1340 U St NW, Washington, DC 20009). The program will begin around 7:00 PM. We encourage early arrival to take advantage of Sudhouse's excellent happy hour, which runs from 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM and features reasonably priced food and drinks. Be sure to check out our fantastic speaker lineup below, and don't forget to RSVP.

CityRoots Project
Manoj Srinivasa on CityRoots, a geospatial analytics platform built with PostGIS that helps cities make data driven decisions about public spaces. By combining community feedback with spatial data, the platform identifies areas where parks can be constructed or revitalized and where underused spaces could be repurposed. In this talk, we will walk through how we designed the system, integrated geospatial queries, and visualized results to guide urban planning. We will also share insights from building CityRoots during a hackathon and demonstrate how open-source tools can empower better civic decision-making.
Demo - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4xJQ4Jfv3c

Geography and Augmented Reality: Designing New Realities
Nino DeBarros presenting on the emerging technology of consumer smart glasses and how GIS/human geography experts may be at the forefront of educating consumers on what it may look like to map out your own world, define it, and walk through it. Demoing example prototype of “Social Reality” - a consumer-focused version of Google Geospatial Content Creator and Niantic Lightship currently in development.

The Desktop GIS Era is Over
Michael Mann on how the GIS industry is clinging to a dying paradigm. While professionals dutifully pay $3,800+ annually for software that crashes when you drag a field in an attribute table, a revolution has already happened: GeoPandas processes 10.8 million monthly downloads, governments from France to the VA are migrating to QGIS, and AI agents now achieve 86% success rates on complex spatial analysis tasks through plain English prompts. This presentation makes the uncomfortable case that traditional desktop GIS—and ESRI in particular—has become the industry's expensive nostalgia trip. We'll examine the mature Python and R ecosystems that match or exceed ArcGIS capabilities at zero licensing cost, documented evidence of ESRI's chronic software quality failures, and the emerging reality of AI-powered "autonomous GIS" that renders point-and-click interfaces obsolete.

And a big thanks to OSM US for sponsoring this Meetup group.

The GeoDC organizing committee.
Chad, Tom, Dan, Puneet