American Samoa GIS User Group meeting
January 16 2003

1. The upcoming visit of Royce Jones (ESRI) and Karyn Nolan (Geo-InSight/Trimble) to American Samoa (the week starting Jan 20th).

The agenda of Royce and Karyn was discussed. It was decided that the broad itinerary would include trainings in the morning at the Community college and then Royce and Karyn can visit each agency in the afternoon.

There will be a GIS user group meeting on Tuesday 21st January between 8am and 12. The meeting will be held at ASPA. It was discussed how each interested agency should provide a 5 minute presentation about the GIS related work that they are undertaking for the benefit of Royce and Karyn.

Agencies can either prepare a SHORT PowerPoint presentation or just talk freely about what projects they are involved with. Mark requested that you let him know ASAP if you wish to do a short presentation.

Mark Hayward will provide the complete agenda to the group ASAP.

2. The upcoming GIS day

A number of tasks were discussed with regard to the GIS day:
Date: it was decided that the week beginning February 10th would be the best. The exact date is yet to be decided. Since Tuesday is a PNRS day and the Thursday and Friday were science days at some of the school, Monday and Wednesday appear to be the best options. Exact date is yet to be decided depending on conference room availability.

Invitations: Mark has obtained a list of all the Directors from BJ. All these people will be contacted by the end of next week. It was suggested the each invite had to be delivered to the directors by hand.

Advert: It was decided to put an advert in Samoa News.

Organize food and refreshments: We decided that it would be a good idea to have food and refreshments. We will need to source funds for this purpose.

Invite keynote speaker: Mark will provide the invite information to Fia Fia who will follow this up.

We will also need to ensure that we have enough tables, chairs, poster boards, power cords, power projector etc.

It was decided to have a GIS Day planning meeting after the GIS user group meeting on Tuesday 21st January at approximately midday at ASPA.

3. SDI updates and feedback

Will White pointed out that agencies need to have read and have provided feedback ASAP so that the GIS day has successful and constructive feedback to the SDI.

Allison Graves suggested that the master copy of the Air Photo Inventory had become a mammoth document and suggested that a summary table needs to be included. Allison also informed the meeting that her Agreement Contract officer in Honolulu had now provided feedback on the MOU.

Mark Hayward discussed how the PC this will become the ftp machine has now been overhauled with new memory and a new hard disk added. The data dictionary will shortly be loaded onto the machine but the machine is still waiting to being set up as an FTP server.

It was acknowledged that Dawn Wright (OSU) had now uploaded much of the data onto her website. It was suggested that the automatic batch file for creating the directory structure would be a useful resource to have on the website.

4. The new AS GIS website

Will White announced that the website was now up and running and thanked people for the positive feedback. Will requested that all news items be passed onto him so that he can put them on the website. Allison suggested that AS GIS user group meeting minutes be put up on the website also.

5. Any other business

Eric asked for an update on Richard Davis. Mark informed the group that Richard was returning to the territory on Monday January 20th in an attempt to obtain more aerial photographs.

Fia Fia discussed the American Samoa Territorial Office of Homeland Security’s GIS plans. Fia Fia asked for comments back on their “GIS needs” document.

This meeting was attended by the following agency representatives:

1. Julie Taomia, ASG Historic Preservation Office
2. Allison Graves, National Park of American Samoa
3. Eric Hanson, American Samoa Community College Land Grant
4. Will White, ASG Department of Marine and Wildlife Resources
5. Mark Hayward, American Samoa Power Authority
6. Fia Fia Sunia, Office of Homeland Security.