Niyam Celebrates GIS Day
This November, Niyam celebrated its first ever organization-wide GIS Day, and in true Niyam fashion, we did not limit it to a single day. We turned it into a month-long celebration.
As a newly re-charted Center of Competency, the GIS CoC wanted to create something that would highlight the geospatial work happening across the company while also offering chances for learning, fun, and connection.
The result was a month filled with creative mapping, team spotlights, friendly competitions, and plenty of shared discovery.
Throughout November, we featured weekly LinkedIn spotlights that introduced GIS team members from across the country. These short profiles highlighted the different experiences and strengths that fuel our geospatial programs, and they also helped raise awareness among partners, clients, and colleagues about the depth of GIS expertise at Niyam.
One of the most popular activities was our Creative Map Challenge, which invited the entire company, not just the GIS folks, to join in. The prompt encouraged people to create a fall-themed map using absolutely anything. And we meant anything. GIS software? Sure. A crayon masterpiece? Absolutely. A GPS walking route? Why not. An arrangement of leaves from your backyard carefully shaped into a map? We would have proudly accepted it.
While participants stuck to more traditional mapping methods this year, the creativity across the company was fantastic.
We kept the friendly competition going with a custom GeoGuessr-style location guessing game on LinkedIn and on our internal communications platform. Staff competed to identify a mystery location using only visual clues, and the mix of friendly rivalry and unexpected geographic expertise made it a genuinely fun activity.
Finally, we wrapped up our celebration with a company-wide GIS trivia event. This one brought together everyone from long-time GIS pros to colleagues who were discovering, for the very first time, that GIS stands for geographic information systems. It was a fun and welcoming way to share a little GIS history, dive into some spatial concepts, and throw in plenty of random geographic trivia that managed to stump even our seasoned experts There was a lot of laughing, a lot of collective head scratching, and a surprising amount of pride in our ability to smash that Kahoot button faster than our coworkers. It was a great way to close out the month and a reminder that learning is always more fun when the whole team joins in!
As the month came to a close, it became clear that GIS Day was more than a series of fun activities. It reflected how far our geospatial community has come in a short period of time. This was our first year celebrating GIS Day as a company, and the enthusiasm across teams showed the momentum, curiosity, and technical strength that the GIS group has been building.
The GIS CoC was re-charted earlier this year with the goal of strengthening geospatial excellence across the company and creating a place where practitioners can learn from one another, share tools, and help raise the quality of GIS work across programs. Although still in its first year, the CoC has grown to more than 20 members who represent a wide range of backgrounds, including GIS analysts, hazard modelers, project managers, scrum masters, data scientists, and developers. Bringing these groups together has created a collaborative community that supports technical skill building, peer mentorship, innovation, and professional growth.
The CoC also serves as a shared space for learning and exploration, and that commitment has already shown results.
This year, three members earned new Esri certifications, and the CoC supported the development of several whitepapers that help shape Niyam’s presence in the geospatial arena. We hosted a series of brown-bag sessions throughout the year to give our members learning opportunities on a wide range of topics, including flood map production, using Typist for geospatial reporting, and GitHub best practices for geospatial tool development.
Members also represented the company at major Esri events, including the Federal User Conference, Partner Conference, and Developer Summit, which helps us stay connected to the constantly evolving world of GIS technology and federal geospatial priorities.
Innovation has also been a major focus of the CoC. This year, members collaborated on several prototype tools that demonstrate how geospatial workflows can support faster and more informed decision-making. These projects include an automated flood depth grid creation workflow, a municipal stormwater maintenance field data collection tool with a monitoring dashboard, and the launch of SPHERE, Niyam’s open-source geospatial risk assessment tool, whose development was led by GIS CoC Co-chair Troy Schmidt.
As we look ahead, we are excited to continue building on this momentum, growing our community, deepening our technical leadership, and expanding Niyam’s role in the broader geospatial industry.
This post is written by Jennifer Sims, head of GIS Center of Competency (CoC).