2007 GOVERNOR'S CONFERENCE ON PUBLIC HEALTH

August 2nd - 3rd was the "Barn Raising" conference in Des Moines. Prior to the conference, an email went out to a list of public health agencies announcing our presence at the conference in hopes of piquing interest in the subject of Health GIS. Simon Geletta and I arranged to have the IGIC materials with us and set up a booth in the exhibit hall to talk to people and share information about the IGIC. We also made a 15 minute presentation to a nice crowd. Overall, these outreach efforts were very successful! I asked the crowd at our presentation how many had heard of or used GIS and several raised their hands. This tells me that we have potentially a large group of users (or future users) when it comes to health GIS in the State of Iowa. Many of the other exhibitors brought maps with them pertaining to their services areas. Many people stopped by the booth to ask questions or tell us about their experiences. I brought along several slips of paper with our website address, which were almost all taken. Hopefully this will generate some traffic to the IGIC site and, perhaps more importantly, a few more participants!