Google Earth Outreach Comes to Canada (and we were there)

A month ago, I was very luck to attend a 3-day workshop put on by Google Earth Outreach Canada in conjunction with Tides Canada. The workshop coincided with Google Earth Outreach’s official launch into Canada, giving Canadian NGOs and First Nations access to the incredible resources of the outreach team and the ability to apply for grants of Google Earth Pro, Sketch-Up and many more Google applications.

I don’t think anyone would dispute the utility of Google Earth and Map applications. One of the biggest barriers to working on environmental issues is often connecting people to the landscape. Whether it’s a remote wilderness area, a piece of agricultural land, a proposal in a community watershed or something impacting migration pathways of birds, Google Maps play an integral role in locating people on the map, connecting them to that landscape and allowing them to visualize what is being proposed. Attending the Google workshop was a fantastic opportunity.

I’ve never been one to call myself technologically adept, but I’m not helpless either, and can proudly say I’ve navigated the html world and successfully tackled a (very small) bit of coding. Here, I’ll admit that my initial attempt, while ultimately successful, was rather comical to watch real-time on the web, as text jumped from 12-point to 86-point, and black to italicized red. The kicker: I hadn’t actually realized that a) I was in the process of writing html, or that even more fundamentally, b) there was a set language code which I could have easily googled; instead, I was reading the code and copying commands, trying to decipher what they would yield. I’m doing a lot better now that I have a copy of html code.

The sessions were incredibly inspiring. Having the opportunity to train on Google applications with the guidance of the Google Outreach team was very helpful and I learned an incredible amount. Seeing examples of what is possible with the Google applications was pretty amazing! Intricate flyovers, graphed representations, visualizing and tweaking GIS data on the Google Earth interface, converting complicated data sets into simple to read graphs and maps...the options seem endless!

The other piece of inspiration came from meeting the other participants in the course, the majority of whom work with ENGOs across BC. There’s a phenomenal bunch of people working on environmental issues in our province! One of our most well-known environmentalists, David Suzuki, gave a passion-filled keynote address to officially launch Google Earth Outreach Canada. 

Having Google Earth Outreach Canada doesn’t just mean that they host fantastic workshops, it also means that if you are a charitable organization or a First Nations community, you can be granted free Google applications, like Google Earth Pro, that lets you make movies of your Google flyovers and lets you import GIS data. More info on granting can be found here.

Thanks to the Google Earth Outreach team and Tides Canada for a great workshop! I highly recommend you take a look around the Outreach team's website to explore the tutorials and see examples of what you can do for free on Google.