Hi everybody, My name is Sunita Duwal. I have graduated in Urban Planning and Management from ITC, The Netherlands in 2013 and now am working as an urban planner in private organisation. I heard about this workshop from one of my friend from ICIMOD. Literally I have no idea about Geodesign. I hope this workshop will be very beneficial for me for further enhancement of my knowledge in urban domain.
Hello @Sunita , Welcome to the community, great to meet you today. Do let me / us know what you thought of the workshop.
Hi everyone!
My name’s Aleksander, I’m a polish landscape architect and urban planner, currently based in Copenhagen. I’m very happy that Hrishi, Emil and Francesco introduced me to this community and I hope to both learn and contribute to it somehow.
I found out about Geodesign quite randomly. I was always interested in working at the intersection of design, urban planning and GIS, so at some point started looking for a good name for my future company and one of the first names I thought off was Geo-Design so I started googling if the domain is already taken 
In 2014 when I worked as a researcher and GIS teacher at the Univ. of Copenhagen, together with few colleagues we managed to organize a Geodesign Conference 2014 with some fantastic speakers, workshops and PhD level course. If it has someone’s interest you can see the recording here https://goo.gl/Z1S95N
We also wrote a book chapter based on our experiences in Denmark http://rius.tudelft.nl/index.php/rius/article/view/795
Apart from geodesign I worked a lot with green infrastructure, urban planning, health design, climate adaptation, urban climates, UHI, organizing workshops and conferences, teaching etc.
Right now I work as a GIS consultant where I spend a lot of time on 3D cities, CityEngine, climate adaptation (mainly water related) and all types of GIS analysis and data production.
Looking forward o getting to know you all!
Alek
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Hi Alek, thank you for joining our Community and sharing your experiences and expertises! They fit perfectly well in the contexts of geodesign. I will definitely take a look at the recordings, one-day conference but prominent speakers! So, are you currently working as GIS consultant in a private company? Did you leave the academic world?
Hi Chiara
That is correct, I work for company called Niras and that is a private sector. I’m not currently involved in any academic endavours, but who knows what future brings always liked it, that’s for sure.
Conference was actually 3 days in total if we include CityEngine workshop given by Elliot Hartley and the subsequent PhD course. I don’t think we have recordings from those though. But you are right that the part open to public was 1day long.
I’ll now delve into reading all those topics that you guys have here
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Hello, I was very pleased to discover GeoDesign thanks to Hrishi live presentation to which I was lucky to attend a month ago. Duncan Lewis from CASA/Bartlett/UCL talked to me about that tool.
I am an urban designer and map fanatic. I do also some independent research, at the moment in London, in connection with various researchers from the Bartlett (DPU, School of Planning, CASA) and also UCL /Geography/ ExCiteS.
My focus is on community-led planning and design. In London I am connected with Just Space which is an important network of grass root community groups who try to influence the Mayor for a community-led London Plan. I developed in collaboration with this network justMap, a tool for community mapping : http://justplace-london.blogspot.co.uk
In Paris I am starting collaborating with a similar network called APPUii https://appuii.wordpress.com/ and we are also working on collaborative mapping and platform projects.
Welcome to the GeodesignHub Community @nicolas_fonty! I had a quick look at your projects links, it’s very interesting what you are doing! I hope you can have the possibility to participate in a Geodesign workshop in the next months.
Hello! My name is Dan and I live in State College, Pennsylvania (USA) and work at Penn State University. I am the Program Manager for our online Masters Degree programs in Geodesign. We have been using geodesign hub in our online courses, particularly our studio based courses where students have been tackling real-world issues. I have been working in various sectors of the GIS industry for over 15 years and I am currently pursuing my Masters in Geodesign.
I have to do a capstone project to complete my Masters program so I will looking at using Geodesign Hub when I decide which project I’d like to tackle. I’m looking forward to being more connected to this community and I want to thank Hrishi, Carl, Stephen, and all of the other folks who have helped to build this tool.
Hey all
I was wondering if anyone is attending Geodesign Conference this January? If anyone is coming please give me a shout and let’s have a chat during the event.
@JeffHerzer are you still coming?
Yes, Alex, I’ll be there. I’ll be getting in Monday night and attending a class session on Tuesday, then leaving on Friday afternoon.
I’m starting to think about all of the questions I want to have answered, particularly dealing with workflows between CityEngine and ArcGIS. If anyone wants to discuss topics, that would be great.
Hello @danmeehan and welcome to the GeodesignHub Community.
I gave a quick look at the stadium development project and I really liked the idea of coupling Geodesign and GeodesignHub to such a topic. Also considering that along with the stadium, district revitalization is quickly becoming a common strategy for most of the major sports’ clubs, worldwide.
However, you are more than welcome to write to the community if you’d like to discuss and brainstorm a bit your Master’s project topic. Do you have any specific challenges in mind, so far?
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Hello, my name is Niek and I am an Earh Scientist interested in the application of Geodesign concepts through practical tools. I have worked in both geo-ict and civil engineering firms and from that I have gained an understanding of the general ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ regarding spatial planning. I am looking to learn here how Geodesign Hub is being used and how I can use it in my own projects. Moreover I am currently working with @hrishiballal on a new tool for the Geodesign toolbox. This tool is intended to make drawing on maps more intuitive and accessible.
Looking forward to hear about your experiences with Geodesign and Geodesign Hub
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Welcome to the Community Niek @nsp! I’m actually quite curious to see and use the new tool of Geodesignhub you and Hrishi are developing! Please, keep us updated
Hello Geodesign Community 
My name is Matthew, I am a grad student seeking a duel masters in landscape architecture and bioregional planning at Utah State University. I was introduced to Geodesignhub by Prof. Barty Warren-Kretzschmar as we prepared for a workshop in Moab, UT, USA during her bioregional studio.
I was very impressed by the success of the workshop. It was refreshing to watch and facilitate as key stakeholders, traditionally at odds, negotiated, discussed, and made concessions. I was interested in learning more about Geodesign and exploring ways to implement the tool that Carl and Hirshi had created. While there, I connected with Emily Niehaus, director of Community Rebuilds and member of the Moab Housing Task Force, and discussed some ideas to run a second workshop focused on affordable housing, one of the key topics identified during the workshop.
For this second workshop we considered altering the workshop format, as we had a group of community planners with some experience with the software. We decided to “preload” the workshop with projects and policies that represented the plans and interests of key stakeholders in the area. As the workshop facilitator, and interested grad student working on a thesis project, I would interview key stakeholders, identified by the housing task force, and input their project and policy ideas into GeodesignHub in advance of the the workshop. We hoped that this would increase the accuracy of the project and policy ideas both geographically and in consideration. We also hoped that this would engage stakeholders and give them more time during the workshop schedule, to negotiate and develop solutions.
We finished the second Moab Workshop in January. The preloading of workshop projects and policies had some interesting effects. I have not finished my study of the Housing Workshop results or finished comparing them to the previous workshop, but I would be happy to answer any questions that anyone in the community might have about “preloading” projects and policies 
.
Thanks for reading, enjoyed reading some of your intoductions and getting to know some of you,
Matthew Starley
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Hello Matthew,
On behalf of the other administrators, Welcome! Happy to have you in the Community site. And thank you for sharing your experience with Geodesign and GDH so far.
I would like to hear more about the effects you mentioned when you preloaded projects. I have done this myself in my second Geodesign workshop ever–and indeed changing that one aspect of the workshop had effects that I did not anticipate. I might message you to compare notes.
Carmela
Greetings from Japan. My name’s Arturo, I was trained as an architect oh so long ago. After gradually migrating to urban planning and urban design, I took some time for military service which separated me from design, generally speaking, but let me see some of the world. After closing that chapter of my life, I decided to pursue studies in GIS, but found the Geodesign program at Penn State, where I completed a master’s cert… As part of that academic track, I was introduced to Geodesign Hub and saw how it was built upon concepts that, had I been able to articulate, would have changed my approach to problems that I encountered in other phases in my career.
At the moment, I am working on a proposal to conduct a geodesign workshop for a community in Southern Japan that is dealing with some contentious land-use issues. It is a little daunting, so I asked Dr. Ballal to help me out. He suggested that I get in touch with this community, so I was encouraged to join.
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Hello Arturo @azm28 ,
Greetings from Australia and and welcome to the community on behalf of the moerators!
Thank you for sharing your background and professional experience with us–eclectic as in true GDH fashion. You said that had you known about Geodesign Hub before, that you might have changed your approach to certain problems. It would be interesting to hear more if you have time to spare and were so inclined to share a for instance.
It would also be good to learn more about your project in Japan as things progress, so please keep us updated.
Carmela
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Thank you so much for the welcome, Carmela. Australia? We’re practically next door neighbors. 
It would be interesting to hear more if you have time to spare and were so inclined to share a for instance.
I worked for a planning consulting firm hired by a city in Southern California on a transit-oriented project years ago. The neighborhood where the project took place had a diverse set of uses, challenges and resident populations. As much as we tried to conduct open and public design workshops, I felt that what I was taking part in had a strong ‘top-down’ dynamic to it; more ‘Cathedral’ than ‘Bazaar’ although the process had the appearance of the latter.
This was also my first experience of working with GIS data, as the municipal surveying department helped me by providing data that I used to generate some maps.
While Geodesign Hub software could have helped in developing better ideas, I think the Geodesign Hub ‘ethos’ (for lack of a better term) would have been a very valuable addition to the public discourse.
There are other examples, but the California one is the first that comes to mind.
It would also be good to learn more about your project in Japan as things progress, so please keep us updated.
This is a lot more difficult than the So.Cal. project, but we’ll see how it goes. Right now I am still working on generating interest, so it is at a very early stage.
Arturo
Hi,
My name is Mohammad, I am Campus Planner at Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, Nigeria. My background is Urban and Regional Planning, I have a Masters in Landscape Architecture (MLA) and M.Sc Geospatial Analysis. I also teach both undergraduate and post graduate courses, and participate in research whenever I can. I am currently participating in the Global Infrastructure program looking at how Geodesign can solve very big problems, particularly how green infrastructure is a more cost effective, environmentally friendly, and socially beneficial alternative to the usual grey infrastructure approaches that currently exist.