Member Spotlight: Christopher Counsell
This 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 model 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.
Watch Christopher's video interview in Kaltura
Providing Geospatial Solutions at Asplundh Australia
“You don’t really quite appreciate how many trees there are.” Christopher Counsell reflects during an interview with the Esri Community team at Esri User Conference 2024. “Where to plant them. Where to maintain them.” He’s probably right. It’s the kind of musing that doesn’t often occur to someone until they’ve tried to plot millions of trees across hundreds of thousands of miles of utilities the way he has.
ArcGIS Dashboard used by Asplundh Australia for their integrated vegetation management programs.
Chris (@ChristopherCounsell) works as a Spatial Solutions Manager in Vegetation Management at Asplundh Australia. Through his work, Chris and his colleagues use the full suite of ArcGIS products to perform vegetation management and arboriculture services for clients that, among others, include Local Council, Rail and Road authorities, Power Distribution corporations, and commercial land clearing operations. Much of the GIS side of that work focuses on field data collection that Chris uses to develop operational efficiencies and provide insights that aren’t obtainable outside of a geospatial context. Beyond knowing which trees require attention, Chris compiles all the accompanying data Asplundh Australia’s team will need to perform their work—details like utility networks, railways, hazards, and landholder boundaries. The scope of Asplundh Australia’s working footprint covers a majority of the entire east coast of Australia as well as New Zealand. As Chris points out, all this information they’re using can come together in a map.
Through his involvement with GIS, Chris has become a familiar presence in parts of Esri Community where a decade of involvement has led to him post at increasing frequency—over a thousand posts having taken place in the last three years alone. What’s more, Chris brings something of a unique experience into his Esri Community involvement: Prior to his current role with Asplundh Australia, Chris worked on the Esri Australia team for the better part of four years where he became appreciatively known as “the ArcGIS Survey123 guy.”
Connecting with Product Teams on Esri Community
2017 and 2018 were foundational years for Chris’s involvement in Esri Community, known at the time as GeoNet. Chris gives a lot of credit to the ArcGIS Survey123 team, who took to Esri Community to provide a steady stream of useful information concerning the product and to directly answer customer questions, all the while fostering an environment for users to support each other through the exchange of knowledge. Chris looks back on that time as a pivotal moment for Esri Community, where the energy generated by active engagement between customers and Esri staff in the ArcGIS Survey123 forums lent a widespread momentum to other product forums found in the platform. Having plugged into that interactive source of support provided Chris’s involvement with a liftoff that hasn’t shown any signs of flagging.
Chris brings up a relatively recent example to highlight why he keeps coming back to Esri Community while connecting the dots between online involvement and the in-person connection opportunities of Esri User Conference.
“I actually caught up this morning with Marianne Farretta [@MarianneFarretta] from the ArcGIS Online product team,” Chris shares while explaining that they’d been in conversation on Esri Community. He explains, “I’d put up quite a technical post, and she reached out to me. Through that Community engagement we were able to work with her.”
“As a result, [Asplundh Australia was] able to make a bunch of upgrades on our side as well as give a lot of feedback into how the ArcGIS Online system was working for us for Marianne’s insight. The ArcGIS Online team made, I think, six or seven fixes and enhancements that came about because of our engagement.”
“Then we ended up weaving back and sharing what the outcomes were with Esri Community.”
“ It’s not something that every product has, and especially not with the level of engagement from both the Community and Esri themselves. ”
Chris is confident that this type of interaction—one that can pave the way for improvements made on both the customer side as well as the Esri product side, not to mention the untold number of users who’ve gone on to benefit from the results of the collaboration—doesn’t happen quite the same way anywhere else.
“It’s not something that every product has,” Chris describes of other companies, “and especially not with the level of engagement from both the Community and Esri themselves.”
If Esri Community weren’t an available resource, Chris expects that he’d be working in a silo a whole lot more. Without a repository of updating information he can research on his own or the option to tap into the collective knowledge of his peers, Chris concludes, “I’d probably place a much greater strain directly on Technical Support services and the product teams.”
Receive Some Help, Give Some Help
Chris’s own role in Esri Community advanced early last year when he was named a winner of the Rising Star category in Esri Community’s 2023 annual contest, having stood out among other users for the quality and quantity of replies to other users. As often happens, this led to Chris being extended an invitation to join the Esri Community MVP program, which he accepted. He’s since doubled down on his earlier performance by winning one of three spots at the top tier Elite Level of 2024’s Esri Community contest, in which only MVPs can compete.
Becoming part of the MVP program may have been a foregone conclusion in Chris’s case. When asked what it is that motivates him to contribute to other users by helping answer their questions, he reveals a simple philosophy of ‘receive some help, give some help’ that can be found at the root of the more than 250 confirmed answers he’s supplied to others in recent years.
Every time he puts up a question and receives an answer, Chris says, “I kind of mentally make a log that I have to now go and give an answer back.” And once given, every kudos or reply of ‘thanks!’ inspires Chris to keep going. The exponential value of having shared a piece of technical expertise that can be circulated for months or years by any number of others is something he finds very personally rewarding.
For Chris, the necessity he feels for Esri Community is something he wants all ArcGIS users to recognize.
“There are other resources available. But the sheer volume of engagement … without the Community,” he searches for the right words before concluding, “You can’t really replace it.”
“I really encourage everyone to use the Community and help drive the future of GIS.”
Christopher Counsell is a Spatial Solutions Manager at Asplundh Australia, where he uses GIS to support utility vegetation management and urban arboriculture. Previously, Chris worked with Esri Australia in addition to other organizations where he held GIS roles. Among his accomplishments, Chris is an Esri Community MVP and two-time winner of different categories in the Esri Community annual contest where he has stood out from hundreds of thousands of his peers for both the quality and quantity of his contributions.
