Esri Community Member Spotlight: Josh Carlson
We’re starting a new monthly series of member spotlights featuring you and your peers here in Esri Community—the people playing a role in finding solutions, sharing ideas, and collaborating to solve problems with GIS. We’re doing this to recognize amazing user contributions, to example how Esri Community’s purpose is being brought to life, and to bring depth to this group of incredible people who may never meet in person, but who benefit from each other’s expertise.
Meeting Josh at User Conference 2022
In introducing Josh Carlson (@jcarlson), it bears pointing out that he’s one of the names in Esri Community that many, if not most, readers are likely to have already come across. With thousands of posts authored and hundreds of Accepted Solutions, the branches of Josh’s contributions in this space stretch expansively. The number of people who’ve benefited from his thoughts and answers can only be guessed at, but there’s no question of their enormity.
Our team had the opportunity to meet with Josh in person at Esri User Conference 2022. He graciously accepted our request to sit down for an interview so that we could scratch those questions our team has been itching to know: How the heck did one of our most active members get started in Esri Community? What have the benefits been? And what advice could he pass along to other members?
Getting Involved in Esri Community
It might be a surprise to hear that Josh’s early days in Esri Community (then GeoNet) were a contrast to the highly active, quick-to-help user he’s become known for in the last couple of years. The honesty was appreciated when he was willing to be open with us that his early experiences with GeoNet sometimes proved to be less than satisfying. Too often, he’d go searching for the answer to a question or issue and find that someone else had encountered precisely the same hurdle, but no solution had yet been offered up. That was frustrating.
There was a point, though, when his thought-process began transforming.
“ I started to think about things differently … I thought, you know,
maybe I’m not supposed to be just a consumer here. ”
Josh’s perspective began shifting from thinking about Esri Community as a space built strictly to serve his needs (and sometimes falling short) to something more cyclical, where his own contributions were a piece of an ecosystem that relies on users giving in addition to receiving. He started to recognize that there were times when he’d end up solving a problem that he or someone else had posted about in Esri Community, but he hadn’t gone back to update the post so that others could benefit from his work moving forward.
He told us, “I started to think about things differently … I thought, you know, maybe I’m not supposed to be just a consumer here.”
The realization he had something of value that could help his GIS peers led Josh to decide that he was going to try and take the time to answer questions and follow up with good information where he could close the loop on open posts.
That mindset—that Esri Community is at its heart modeled after the dynamics of IRL communities, where everyone gets when everyone gives—resulted in a dramatic shift in Josh’s participation, to the point where his contributions even took home first place in our 2021 Esri Community Contest at the Elite Level of competition.
The Benefits of Esri Community
When asked how Esri Community is helping serve his needs, Josh responded, “We use Enterprise, we use all the online stuff, and a lot of desktop things, and all the apps. So, there’s a ton of stuff going on in the Community that’s directly applicable to the work we do every day.”
What’s more, he’s found ways of using Esri Community to peer around the corner and start getting familiar with upcoming features. An example he gave was of a product he hadn't been using in his job: ArcGIS Online Dashboards. It's a product that can receive new, exciting updates at an early stage—things that he might have to wait a little longer to get into his own workflow when the next ArcGIS Enterprise version comes out, but that he can already see other users discussing in Esri Community.
“ The week after we had access to [Dashboard Data Expressions] I’d
been testing out and answering questions on, we were able to completely
re-work one of our main workflows, and took it from something
simple and clunky to this multi-faceted, really efficient tool … ”
Rather than sitting back and longing for those new features to reach ArcGIS Enterprise, Josh recognizes a chance to start developing familiarity with things he’ll be putting to use down the road. He’s made a point of looking at the questions of people already working with new features—as in the past case of data expressions. Because some time passed between data expressions’ appearance in ArcGIS Online to when it became available in ArcGIS Enterprise, Josh would engage with people asking questions about how to do different things with it.
“I just decided, I’m going to figure this out,” he said of others' questions.
Josh has a dashboard in ArcGIS Online that’s just for testing Esri Community things and so he’d use the questions he was seeing as the primer to run tests and come up with answers. By the time data expressions came to ArcGIS Enterprise, Josh had a solid framework of ideas and understanding around how he wanted to implement it.
Josh continued, “The week after we had access to [Dashboard Data Expressions] I’d been testing out and answering questions on, we were able to completely re-work one of our main workflows, and took it from something simple and clunky to this multi-faceted, really efficient tool …”
We love this example of how Josh has been able to leverage Esri Community to immerse himself in concepts and knowledge that, even in cases when not immediately applicable to his day-to-day work, pay off in effective, tangible outcomes.
Josh’s Advice for Others
When asked what kind of advice he’d give to other GIS professionals who haven’t yet joined Esri Community, Josh’s response was emphatic and clear: “Do it. Sign up!”
But beyond those who may be discovering Esri Community for the first time, Josh addresses people already in the Community who, for one reason or another, may be holding back adding their own ideas, answers, or experience:
“A lot of times, you don’t know what you might have some valuable input on. … There might be things you’re doing or problems you’ve dealt with in the past that someone else is struggling with.”
It’s an entirely human experience to assume that we aren’t good enough, smart enough, experienced enough for our thoughts to hold value for others. In all too many cases, that’s just not true. The GIS community is populated by people at all stages of proficiency, and we can all contribute something that helps another reach their next step.
Josh Carlson is a GIS Analyst for Kendall County, Illinois and has been a part of Esri Community since late 2018. In 2021 he earned the role of MVP in Esri Community and won the Elite Level of competition in our Esri Community Contest, both in recognition of the magnitude of his contributions.