Esri Community Member Spotlight: Peter Knoop
This monthly series of member spotlights features 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 generous expertise.
A Support for 10,000 ArcGIS Users
At the University of Michigan, a group of nearly 10,000 current students, faculty, and staff—about 10% of the available population—are registered within the school’s ArcGIS system. That’s an eye-catching increase of almost 6,000 users over the last three years that offers some sense for how active and growing the level of GIS adoption within the school has become.
Those users leverage GIS for their research and projects that can vary drastically in both scope and degree of complexity. And when an individual finds they need some guidance in their work, they’ll often seek help from a modest group of on-staff consultants that includes Esri Community member Peter Knoop (@PeterKnoop).
Peter's article on building a GIS dashboard links to this University of Michigan ArcGIS Usage Dashboard
We met with Peter at Esri Developer Summit 2023, where he shared with us that on a typical day, he connects with about a dozen people or groups regarding their projects.
“… of course, a lot of it ends up being troubleshooting when people run into problems on [their] project and they need help trying to figure out what to do,” Peter said. “And sometimes I know what to do, other times I have to turn to other resources, like Esri Community, and get some help.”
Because of the group size Peter and his colleagues support, it’s virtually impossible to be an expert in the entire suite of more than 100 Esri products that their users may be drawing on in any given instance.
Peter remarked, “So that's where me and a couple of my colleagues who are responsible for doing this for the entire University find it to be a great resource, particularly when it's in areas outside of what we're already familiar with.”
He summarized the thought, “I think Esri Community is one of the best resources out there when you need to step past the documentation, or you don't have time to sort through the documentation.”
Advancing Collective Higher Education Objectives
The nature of Peter’s work and physical distance between peers performing similar functions in other higher education settings has presented a collaboration challenge. Though Peter has a cadre of colleagues he can partner with in many circumstances, the absence of outside perspective from others with similar industry experience can be limiting. Viewed from another angle, there are significant benefits to be had when acting within a broad partnership of like-minded individuals.
Through Esri Community, Peter has been able to locate other professionals working at the intersection of GIS and higher education.
Peter shared, “One of the things that's been helpful about the Esri Community for us in higher education is it's helped us find other people at peer institutions doing similar things. … we get together and sort of talk about what would help us the most as a whole sector of higher education and then talk with the [Esri Developer] teams from that perspective of what would help us all.”
“ [It gets] you to step back a bit and think more about—
What’s really my underlying problem here? What’s my use case?
What scenario or goal am I trying to achieve? ”
Through connections facilitated in part by the Esri Community, Peter and this network of members compare product enhancement needs and find agreement on priorities while also pinning down shared questions. As a collective, they’ve been able to take their results to Esri teams—through direct meetings, ArcGIS Ideas submissions, and in-platform interactions—to advance their shared objectives in a way that’s united, efficient, and effective.
When it comes to leveraging ArcGIS Ideas in particular, Peter and the other members have developed a system by which they capture their Institutions’ top product Ideas submitted to Esri Community in a shared document, followed by discussion and rank-voting them. Consensus reached, prioritized Ideas are brought to select Esri Development teams for more in-depth discussion. This process helps Esri teams maintain efficiency through their established workflows while maximizing attention and understanding around the higher education group’s biggest needs, and it exposes their suggestions to the entire Esri Community who can also comment on and add Kudos to the Ideas.
Plus, Peter pointed out, he sees another important benefit of the Ideas Exchange in that it helps people understand and refine what they’re asking for when they submit an idea.
“[It gets] you to step back a bit and think more about—What’s really my underlying problem here? What’s my use case? What scenario or goal am I trying to achieve?” Peter noted. “A lot of times, people get sidetracked by the solution.”
A Karmic Exchange
Even while thinking as a representative of his University and the higher education community, Peter realizes he has an additional role to play that benefits the broader GIS community. Among his many contributions across Esri Community forums are dozens of answers to others’ questions and a number of Blog articles he’s authored.
When it comes to publishing articles, Peter wants his knowledge to be in service to the greater higher education community, though there’s a personal benefit to embracing this process as well: It lightens his email response workload by, with a single post, answering questions he can be asked numerous times in the course of his work.
Peter highlighted how he’s begun leveraging the comments section of his articles in much the same way, “I also am starting to try to encourage folks from other institutions who ask me a question directly via email, which others might have as well, to repost in the Community, and I'll answer it there.”
There’s a third reason Peter makes time for contributions in Community—a more poetic vision in that he sees giving back as a form of karmic equity.
Peter reflected, “… it’s often easy just to type out a quick response and then share it out there. Sort of balancing out that karma if you've got good answers, so you better contribute something to keep getting.”
With an ultimate goal of connecting Michigan University’s ArcGIS users with GIS resources that propel them forward, Peter knows his own contributions help ensure the value available to those faculty, students, and staff keeps growing.
