CEW VP Statement

Back to 2017 Nominations and Ballot

Christine White

Serving the past year as your Vice President has been an honor, and I hope to continue in 2017 in this role with your support.

The ESIP Vice President supports the ESIP President, serves on the ESIP Board, and undertakes other activities as appropriate. This past year I worked closely with the ESIP Leadership and Staff as we carried out essential envisioning, revising, and coordination that interpreted ESIP's 19 year history to develop a near and long term strategy for the future.

This process involved understanding the findings from an external review ESIP commissioned, developing and documenting governance changes to simplify the organization's structure and empower its membership, and determining how to best support and encourage the unique community aspects of ESIP that make it the dynamic and valuable organization that it is. Every ESIP Leadership person, Board Member, and staffperson contributed - and many of you in our community also - such that in 2017 ESIP will be well positioned to continue in our Strategic direction, and also do new things we can't yet even imagine.

Besides working on these foundational changes I also had the opportunity to serve ESIP in other ways. I got to represent ESIP to our DC-based sponsors with Emily and Erin back in April, to help vet Testbed project proposals through the Testbed Configuration Board, to support the student fellow selection process the past two years, to support many of the Summer meeting's creative aspects such as content in part of the plenaries, emcee-ing and supporting lightning talks and Research as Art, and participating in International Data Week. My near term emphases for Winter 2017 are developing processes to capture and share ESIP success stories, and also how to grow leadership resources within ESIP and also the Earth Science community.

"ESIP makes data matter by making people matter."

My Career Life, and ESIP

I bring the best of my past experience to this opportunity - in the geospatial software and data world, I've worked as a consultant, project manager, product manager, and now a technical advisor at Esri. In these roles, teamwork has been by far the most important contributor to success - to see solutions that aren't the obvious ones, develop plans and asking for critique, and continuously improving and innovating knowledge collectively. I share what I learn from my ESIP colleagues with my Esri colleagues and vice versa - the idea is to build connections so scientists can do their important research and communicate it with software supporting them the best way.