Last fall, Joe and I had met with Dan Shoutis to talk about the various kinds of things that we were up to, and get a greater understanding of how it might impact the overall Geo market. We had a fantastic conversation, and it was clear that Dan was an individual with an incredible sense of what’s up in the world of location.

So we had brainstormed just a bit and decided that, while it didn’t quite make sense to hire him at that time, we still wanted to have his mindshare around the office. What did we come up with?

Sponsor a desk

If you’re a company with a little extra space, and you know of some folks that are thinking about the same, or similar kinds of problems as you, but are independent contractors, or working on their own gig, do them a favor: sponsor a desk. It’s really easy to do…just write up some simple NDA’s, maybe some sort of contractor agreement that says that you’ll be trading some desk space for some time and you’re done.

In our case, in exchange for the desk space and access to our office, Dan agreed to give us one hour a week of consulting work. For us, it’s more than helpful. Our team is primarily engineers, and they all bring unique and interesting things to the table, but some of them are somewhat unfamiliar with the intricacies of the geographic world. So we are beginning to solve that with this setup.

Have brown bag lunches

Today we began an experiment, one that would bring in experts in our field periodically to help think through some of the unique issues that we may be facing, as well as just get a general sense of what that expert might be facing. So we brought in all of our current and future employees, and even had our SF engineer extraordinaire, Mike Malone join us via video.

Dan has spent the time informing the team about the world of Geographic Information Systems, and helping us understand some of the basic concepts that the GIS world has known for years. We solve some of the various problems he talked about in very different way than most of the GIS community, so it’s very cool to see how people have done it for years, and what our work and contribution might mean for the future.

We’re certainly excited to see what comes of this “partnership”, however informal that it may be. We’ll also be very inclined to recommend this setup to others, as well as try bringing other individuals over time as it makes sense. It’s been a lot of fun so far.