Hey there,

Today I'd like to reflect a bit on building connections with people working in that same domain as me.

⛰️ Nerds & Hikes

I've been working in the satellite image industry and what us domain experts scientifically refer to as maps for about 4 years professionally, yet I've only met few of the people in the same field as me in person.

My first real job was at Iceye and I started in March 2020. You know that time which in hindsight was a terrible timing to change countries (Though Finland probably was one of the best places in the world to go through Covid). I worked for 1 week at the office before everyone needed to start working from home.

It's in part because of the pandemic that I started the Minds Behind Maps podcast (and clearly I wasn't the only one, the number of new podcasts exploded during covid). While I've tried to do as many in person recordings as I can, most have been remote.

My point here is that I actually haven't met that many people in person in the field I work in.

The place most people in a given industry meet tends to be conferences. I haven't gone to much of those -again thank you covid- as many of these take place in the US, which is far (thus expensive) for someone that isn't in North America.

But I was able to go to SatCamp last week, and I want to talk about the experience.

The idea behind SatCamp was: What if we made a conference, but stripped out most of the talks you can watch online later anyways and instead focused on spending time with the people attending. The main objective being to have conversations and spend meaningful time together rather than have presentation on a big stage, and I loved every second of it.

First of all because it took place in Boulder, Colorado, which was one of the places I wanted to go to in my life. We also took full advantage of this by dedicating mornings to hikes, trail runs, climbing or any other outdoor activity, all in the beautifully stunning mountains next to the venue.

Second because the group was quite small, this wasn't a 10,000 people event, we were about 60. By the end of it I had talked to nearly everyone at least once and could just about keep in mind who everyone was.

There were also a few house rules, that I thought were a solid foundation to making sure people took the most out of these few days

The above isn't the best picture, so here are some of the main points:

• Be Authentic -> People were themselves, not the representative of their employers
• ​Chatham House (I didn't know this prior but grew to like it) -> Anyone can repeat what was said during the event, but not attribute it to a individual: "Someone at SatCamp said..."
• Pollinate -> Once you've had what you wanted, change conversation groups

The main point was: We want to focus on the people present here, have candid conversations without fear of the reaction of people not present here and now, today.

This was a refreshing take on a gathering of many people interested in the same industry. Getting people to be candid is no simple task, especially when said people are all from different organisations, working cultures and have different incentives. But I appreciated being a part of a group of people who gave it a try and attempted a different approach to a conference.

We talked about some of the new tools being build to make use of large scale datasets on the cloud, explored the benefits and drawbacks of different business models -from VC to bootstrapped and everything in the middle- discussed the role of the private sector and public institutions in science and in building applications. Climate change was a hot topic too. People disagreed but with respect. We had people from a wide spectrum of organisations, from the public side like NASA and the USGS, NGOs like Radient Earth promoting more opened data & tools for Earth observations or OpenStreetMap US, researchers, entrepreneurs building VC backed companies and others creating bootstrapped ones, engineers, designers, you name it. It felt like a melting pot of people who want to build a better future with the common point being maps, who don't all agree on the way to get there but that are willing to listen to each other.

One of the unexpected points for me was the number of people who already knew me ahead of the event. I run a podcast where the target audience is exactly the people at this conference so it probably should not have come as a surprise. Ironically, on a day to day podcasting is quite a lonely endeavour, with relatively little interaction with the group of people one talks to on a regular basis. But talking to the people on the other side who listen to the conversations I put out made it feel all very real.

These events inherently aren't for everyone: They require having the time or convincing one's employer, costs more than a lot of people can afford, and take places in parts of the world not everyone can easily access. The Internet has been an amazing tool at breaking some of those barriers down but there still is nothing like grabbing a drink or going on a hike with someone with many of the same interests and sharing a few days together.

This also was an opinionated event. There were a lot of outdoors events, this wasn't a place to sell one's product or create new leads. But I'm glad this existed and was opinionated, because I fit the bill and am glad I got to hang out with people who are similar to me.

This was also one of the first times in a long while that I felt apart of this community of people building maps on the internet. It's a weird yet incredibly addicting feeling to have this sense of belonging with a group of people. I'm thankful to all the team that put this one of a kind event together and experimented in what a conference could be like.

Over the past few years I've tried to look for innovations outside of purely the technology lens; new business models, different policies or education. This event felt like it was trying to innovate on what a professional gathering could look like, and I'm glad I was along for the ride.

🔗 Interesting Findings

Lately I've tried to pull myself out of social media towards more "hand curated" reads, here are mine.

A few newsletters I read share things they come across so I thought I'd share some of what I recently read that I thought worth talking about:

• ​A look into how hyperlocal weather enthusiasts are filling in gaps from India's weather models and becoming local influencer.
• ​David Rumsey's website, which retrieves occurrences of a word on old maps.
• I'm going to recommend Rest of World as a whole, they are consistently putting out stories of how tech actually gets used outside of the West. It's a wonderful resource to have a more worldwide view on the use and impact of technology on places I often hear very little about.

🎙️ Stuff I've worked on

(Alt title: Shameless self plug)

In case you missed it, here's a recap of some of the latest Minds Behind Maps episodes:

• ​An Introduction to Earth Observation Aravind from the excellent TerraWatch Space newsletter came on the podcast to provide an introduction to what the Earth observation industry looks like, from the companies taking satellite images down to creating applications like the weather app on our phones. I recommend you watch this one as there are a lot of additional visuals.
• ​Why Did Apple Get into Maps? A conversation with ex-Apple Maps employee James Killick (who also has 40 years of experience working in mapping, starting on some of the earliest in car navigation systems at Etak in 1985 (!)) about the history and rational behind Apple investing in making their own map.
• ​Patreon Exclusive: Reflecting on 50 episodes of Minds Behind Maps I recently published the 50th episode of Minds Behind Maps. My previous newsletter issue was some thoughts on this, but I also released a Patreon Exclusive solo podcast episode sharing more in depth reflections, in the same medium as the rest of the podcast.

If you like what I do and want to support it, Patreon is the best place to do so.​

As always please feel free to let me know what you think about all of this, share any interesting reads you've found or just say hi!
​
Cheers,
Maxime

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