Join us at the Fall 2024 Northeast Arc Users Group Conference
We're excited to be a sponsor of the Fall 2024 NEARC Users Group Conference, held October 27-30 at the Hotel Champlain in nearby Burlington, Vermont.
NEARC user conferences are held twice a year. It's an opportunity to learn tips and tricks of Esri's geographic information systems (GIS) software directly from Esri technical staff and fellow users.
Stone staff members will be sharing their knowledge and experience with a variety of presentations.
For event details and registration, visit the event site here>>
We hope to see you there!
Stone Staff Presentations
GIS Educators Day: New York State K-12 Geography Education with ArcGIS Online
Paige Gebhardt, Stone GIS specialist; Jeff Herter, Special projects manager, NY Department of State
Sunday October 27, 9:15 - 9:45 a.m. EDT
Venue: Montpelier C
The New York Department of State, Office of Planning, Development, and Community Infrastructure, with Stone Environmental, have reimagined the New York Geographic Information Gateway website using ArcGIS Online. Now that the new Gateway is live, the team has turned their attention to a version of the website for kids in grades 3-6. The website is called KidsMapVenture and the team built it with ArcGIS Hub, ArcGIS StoryMaps and an ArcGIS Instant App. The purpose of the site is for kids to learn about geography with interesting, engaging ArcGIS Online content and external websites. Also, KidsMapVenture empowers educators with resources and activities for their students to enhance learning about geography, particularly in New York State.
Our team carefully designed content that is relevant to New York State learning standards to support teachers’ curriculum and help kids gain skills in geographic awareness. We conducted user research with adults and students, integrating their input into an accessible design. Learn how our team configured a GIS website for a younger audience, the tools they used, user research sessions that helped enhance the content, and design choices that make the website interesting for kids.
ArcGIS Online and Hub: Using ArcGIS Online to Connect Vermonters to the Internet
Mary Haley, Stone GIS specialist
Tuesday October 29, 11 - 11:30 a.m. EDT
Venue: Green Mountain B
Vermont, one of the most rural states in the U.S., is leading the charge to expand broadband internet access to its citizens. The Vermont Community Broadband Board (VCBB) is responsible for overseeing this work, distributing funding to, and collaborating with regional partners. Stone Environmental, an Esri Silver Business Partner, empowered the VCBB with ArcGIS Online to manage data. Learn how Stone and the VCBB use ArcGIS Hub, ArcGIS Dashboards, and Experience Builder to bridge the digital divide in Vermont. We'll dive into a specific case study looking at the State-led BEAD Challenge process and the challenges and unique solutions Stone configured to meet federal requirements and the needs of Vermont addresses lacking adequate access to broadband services.
Dive Deeper Into Technical Skills 1: Custom ArcGIS Widget Development and the GIS Cloud
Chris Aragon, Stone front-end developer
Tuesday October 29, 2:30 - 3 p.m. EDT
Venue: Lake Champlain A
Learn how to use JavaScript frameworks, data structures, and design principles to make your own custom, reusable Esri widgets in ArcGIS Experience Builder.
Stone Environmental’s Geospatial and Data Solutions Team will share its strategies and code for customizing ArcGIS Experience Builder widgets to push your web and mobile applications to the next level. We will share our New York Geographic Information Gateway web app, which aims to democratize New York’s geospatial data for educational, recreational, and citizen science purposes. This app brings Esri mapping to everyone, regardless of experience. It was built with ArcGIS Experience Builder, but unfortunately the platform did not offer the state everything it wanted out of the box, and there is little documentation on customizing this state-of-the-art Esri suite.
Join our presentation as we share what we’ve learned about customizing Experience Builder widgets and how to optimize custom code in your Esri applications. We will share how JavaScript, TypeScript, React.js and Redux can integrate cleanly into your development experience. We will also demonstrate how to access and build on open-source widget code from Esri. We will share helpful tricks we discovered in our work, as well as explore principles of design and accessibility to make a sleek and stylish front-end experience. Finally, we will unpack helpful strategies for data manipulation and control within and across Experience Builder widgets, which will help any GIS developer in their projects.
This presentation will require experience with JavaScript, TypeScript, React.js, CSS, JSX, Redux, Git, and ArcGIS Experience Builder.
Dive Deeper into Technical Skills 2: Tiles and Tribulations
Andrew Joseph, Stone software engineer
Wednesday October 30, 8:30 - 9 a.m. EDT
Venue: Lake Champlain A
Vector tiles are rapidly rising in popularity due to improved performance over raster tiles and the ability to dynamically style maps based on attribute data.
Traditionally vector tiles have required creating an entire static dataset upfront before serving it. This can be quite time consuming and cumbersome, especially during the early phase of a web application build.
Recently the ArcGIS JS api has been quietly equipped with some features that allow reading of attributes from third-party vector tiles servers.
Stone will demonstrate how a developer can leverage pg_tileserv to automatically create instantaneous layers for any table, view or tileset returning function in a Postgis database and dynamically style them in the ArcGIS JS Api client without needing to pre-generate any static tilesets in advance.
We will also go over some tips for vector tile performance learned in recent projects at Stone.