My name is Matt Wilson. I'm a new faculty member in the Department of Geography and in the College of Arts and Sciences.
One of the projects that I have been focusing on this semester is really trying to figure out how to leverage the resources
of the university and the college around GIS, or around geographic information systems and mapping technologies more 
generally-- how to leverage those resources to really work with community organizations in Lexington and Fayette County.

One of the projects we've been particularly interested in is working with a group called OpenLexington, which is a 
community-based nonprofit that is focused on data transparency in government. We are working with them along with Lexington
Fayette Urban County Government around something we're calling the Open Data Initiative, which is largely focused on 
providing not only GIS or spatial data layers, but broader data sets that the municipal government captures-- providing 
those data sets more freely and openly to the general public. 

We think that the College of Arts and Sciences has the resources and the capacity to really help with that infrastructure,
and so we're leveraging not only the sort of technical resources that we have here, but also providing really interesting 
partnerships with students in a class that we're calling GIS Workshop. 

GIS Workshop students partner with community organizations around the use of geographic information systems toward the 
mission of these individual community organizations. So this semester we are working with nine different community groups,
focusing on anything from urban gardening, to Kentucky River water quality issues, working with open data around
OpenLexington's work, as well as just doing general work in the broader Appalachian region with the Appalachian Center, 
focusing on post offices and a museum trail with the Kentucky Department of Tourism, the idea largely being that we want to 
give students the capability to work with community groups around the use of some of these technologies. 
And we are finding that GIS Workshop is one of the better ways to sort of do that work.