A Time of Transition

USGIF CEO Keith Masback speaks at a recent USGIF GEOINTeraction Tuesday event.

We at USGIF are proud of our status as a nonprofit educational foundation. Not all nonprofits are the same, and the various designations are not trivial, with different categories denoting specific organizational constructs.

Given our 501c3 status, USGIF is committed to supporting education, training, and professional development. The Foundation doesn’t lobby Congress nor generally carry the torch for any specific topic. As I like to say, USGIF was founded with the idea that a rising tide would truly raise all boats—that Building the Community, Advancing the Tradecraft, and Accelerating Innovation would benefit all stakeholders across industry, academia, and government.

USGIF is unwavering in our educational mission, and we too must continue to learn both organizationally and personally. Now, in a period of great external change, we must be more agile than ever. USGIF’s GEOINT Community Week has grown significantly over time since its beginning as a modest tech showcase. In 2016, our event in St. Louis expanded in an exciting way as the Foundation collaborated with innovation hubs in the city. We continue to develop special programs based on Community interest and need, such as our Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Workshop in January. The GEOINT Symposium is a constantly evolving process as we seek to actualize attendee feedback, showcase emerging capabilities, and meet industry best practices.

The USGIF team comprises avid learners, with many of the staff holding multiple professional certifications in their respective fields. Our two journalists, Jordan Fuhr and Kristin Quinn, have tremendous educational and professional backgrounds.

Kristin recently led an effort to refresh trajectory magazine. We’re intensely proud of our award-winning publication and confident the updates to the content and design will help trajectory maintain its reputation for superb coverage of relevant topics. Reader feedback was particularly helpful in shaping our approach, and I encourage you to share your thoughts on the new look. Along with the print refresh, we will soon launch a newly designed trajectory website that will be fully responsive to individual devices and operating systems. Our intent is for the new site to deliver a consistently comfortable experience from smartphones, tablets, and desktops.

In this issue, we look ahead to the Next NGA West campus in St. Louis and NGA’s plans for an unclassified, collaborative environment and a mobile-friendly workplace. This issue also includes features on the ever-expanding Internet of Things and the advent of GEOINT-enabled precision agriculture. On the final page, we introduce a new department called “Perspective,” in which we will interview various visionaries from across the GEOINT Community.

While “transition” is the current hot topic here in the D.C. area, USGIF remains an agile, learning organization in perpetual transition as we strive to meet the needs of our extended GEOINT Community now and into the future. I look forward to seeing you in our hallways and conference rooms as well as at our events and programs in the coming weeks and months. And of course in June at the GEOINT 2017 Symposium, which returns to San Antonio and its newly renovated convention center. Thank you for your ongoing support of and confidence in USGIF.