Request to Initiate a New User Group – Spatial Data in Data Lakes & Big Data Platforms

[VenkataKondepati]

Hi Team,

I would like to initiate a new user group to bring together community members interested in using Data Lakes and Big Data platforms with spatial data. The goal would be to provide a space where Data Analysts and Data Scientists can share best practices, architectures, and experiences integrating spatial data with technologies such as Snowflake, Databricks, AWS Athena, Apache Iceberg, and related platforms.

This group could cover topics such as:

• Storing and querying spatial data in modern Data Lake / Data Warehouse environments.

• Optimizing interoperability between ArcGIS and big data ecosystems.

• Use cases for analytics, visualization, and AI/ML with spatial data.

• Sharing patterns, scripts, and integration practices.

I do not see an option to directly create a new user group myself. Could you please confirm:

• Are new user groups only initiated by the Esri Community Team?

• If so, what is the process for requesting and setting up a group like this?

• How can I invite interested community members once the group is created?

I believe this would add real value to the community, as many organizations are actively adopting cloud-native data lakehouses and want to leverage spatial data alongside enterprise analytics.

Thank you for your guidance.

Best regards,
Venkat

[JesseCloutier]

Hi Venkat,

These are some great ideas and topics that I could certainly see being valuable to a number of Esri Community users. While User Groups can be run by non-staff users (we have some related documentation here: New Place or Group Request & Change Request Process) I believe we do already have a User Group in Esri Community that provides strong overlap with what you have in mind: Enterprise Spatial Analytics. Our team wants to discuss this more with you—expect a Private Message from me about it, shortly.