Here at the 2010 Technologies for Critical Incident Preparedness (TCIP) conference, the exhibits sort of look like a GIS meeting with an attitude. The emphasis for this year's conference is heavy on GIS, spatial intelligence, situational awareness, and all the accompanying technologies. (Well, after all, the conference is Technologies for Critical Incident Preparedness.) Here's a quick tour of the exhibits hall. Down this aisle is the military applications (extremely cool stuff) from Google maps and Virtual USA to simulations to gadgets for starting fires to calming insurrections. The next aisle over features interoperability capability for just about anything that needs to be interoperable. (Have we actually reached operability, so we can move on to INTERoperability?) Anyway, the next aisle is all the R&D folks and they have⦠oh, I'm breathless. Overall, the technology is overwhelming. I actually had to have some coffee (i.e., caffeine) to calm down! Seriously, we are operating in the future tense here. This is Star Trek, Star Wars, NCIS, and CIS in one room. Admittedly, there are few solutions looking for problems, but there's something else about this 2010 TCIP conference/exhibit that's not on the program or the list of exhibitors. It's more overwhelming than either. And that's the ideas, concepts, and possibilities being discussed in the sessions, in the hallways, and on the exhibit floor, among speakers, sponsoring agencies, and participants. The real value is there. The ability to ask 'what if' and have someone else say 'well, we can do that now' is quite an experience. When I arrived, I thought 'I don't anybody here, I'm not sure I'll understand the technology' but it wasn't long till I made new acquaintances, increased my own technical knowledge and learned more than I thought I ever would in the short period of time I had. A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that this would not be the kind of conference you wished you had stayed home and done something more productive (like counting paper clips). You should have listened to me.
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