Contributed by WAGISA member Kevin Le

Stephen Beimborn with his 2025 Summit Award plaque at the Washington GIS conference in Tacoma, WA, June 17, 2025

At the 2025 Washington GIS Conference, one of the ‘peaks’ of the multi-day event was the announcement of the Summit Award winner. The Summit Award is for the GIS Person of the Year and is given to a Washington State GIS Professional who has made an impact on our local GIS community through their involvement in WAGISA, contributions to the GIS profession over their career and the excellent GIS work they are able to produce. Each year, the winner of this award is the person that represents the best that Washington’s GIS community has to offer.

No person fits that description more than the 2025 winner, Stephen Beimborn! Stephen has had an incredible career in GIS, with this past Conference marking 42 years in the field! Over his long career, he has dedicated significant time to the GIS community, serving as WAGISA president from 2019-2021 and continuing to be an active volunteer since. Everyone that has had the privilege to work alongside Stephen knows his bright enthusiasm and smiles are backed by a depth of GIS knowledge and commitment to the GIS professionals around him. WAGISA and the Washington GIS Community would not be where it is today without his contributions and hard work.

We recently sat Stephen down for an interview, reflecting on the award and his GIS Journey:

How did you find the field of GIS? 

As far back as I can remember, I studied almanacs and sports statistics and my collection of National Geographic maps. Of the vocational classes I later took as a teenager, I enjoyed the mechanical and architectural drafting classes. But I also enjoyed social sciences, writing and languages. 

I ultimately got a college degree in International Studies. Naturally I did a lot of research in the library. For a time I considered going to the school of Library Science so I could get a job as a reference librarian but instead I found GIS. I think I most enjoyed the spatial relationships the information has and the visual aspects of it. And the practical usefulness.

What got you started in the field and what are some highlights over your long career? 

It was just after my sophomore year at the UW in June 1983 that I got my first GIS job. I was applying for work study jobs over the summer and the first place I interviewed at was Northwest Cartography. After a brief interview and tour, they asked me whether I could start the next day! (Author’s note: if only it were that easy nowadays…)

At Northwest Cartography, my job was to tape paper or mylar documents to a digitizing tablet, register them to a coordinate system, and follow the lines with a digitizing puck to create GIS data. I would write the data to tapes, transfer it to a minicomputer, plot it on paper using a pen plotter, take the paper to a light table, compare the lines I had captured to the originals, and correct my mistakes. I can proudly say that I didn’t make many mistakes, but when I did, it was because the paper had stretched and it threw things off! 

Our company was later bought by a national engineering and environmental consulting company. I recall mapping utilities, power transmission and pipeline corridors, hazardous waste sites, potential waste storage sites, soil and water samples, modeling results, military bases slated for closure. Anything we could land a contract to map or analyze.

After I was married and my first of three children was on the way, I wanted something less hectic and more stable than the consulting world. After quitting my job in June 1985 to travel to Greece and Turkey for the summer, I found a job at the City of Seattle in the Engineering Department. That is where the GIS group resided until we merged into Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) in 1997. 

Initially I was a cartographer who produced maps for city departments. I found it every bit as varied and interesting as my private sector job. One of my first projects was to identify areas of the city that were under-served by the library system so they could choose the optimal locations for new libraries. 

After some time, I worked on an update to the hand-drawn Water System map books. I learned to build GIS data editing applications and trained the mapping staff to enter the data. As an offshoot of working so closely with them, and now with three kids at home, I decided to apply to be the utility GIS supervisor. 

In that role I continued to do a share of the GIS Analyst work. By 2007, though, I had stopped doing “real work” and had fully transitioned to becoming the GIS Section Manager in SPU’s IT division. 

In the SPU GIS section we mostly built applications and maintained data for SPU. We also maintained the central GIS data and infrastructure services for all the city departments. We acquired imagery and maintained streets, addresses, common place names, legal lots and blocks, and other citywide base layers. Department data was stored on our servers and shared across the city. 

My current job is a continuation of my previous role because, back then, we also performed additional work for departments like Police, Fire, Emergency Management and Transportation. And we staffed a public map counter that offered custom maps. There has never been a question of having enough work.

What GIS software and tools do you remember starting off with?

When I started at Northwest Cartography, I used software that was written by in-house programmers. Arc/Info was around also, but was not yet as widespread as it is today. I next learned the Intergraph brand of mapping and GIS, first using a great big VAX workstation, before moving to Microstation running on PCs. 

Northwest Cartography also had a photo-mechanical cartography “side of the house”. I was often called over there to work in the dark room or to perform detailed scribing or cut materials with sharp tools. I’m fortunate to have seen how maps were made before GIS flooded the zone. Nothing but respect for those manual cartographers.

When I got to the City in 1995, I learned ArcInfo and made maps by writing AML scripts and running them on Unix workstations. It seemed like we went through ArcInfo 5, 6, 7, and 8 in quick succession, then ArcView 3.x arrived and then PC ArcInfo and then ArcMap. I continued to use ArcInfo until my days as GIS Analyst came to an end when I entered IT management around 2006. 

We printed a lot of hard copy maps and wall-sized maps and often laminated them or mounted them on foam boards. I was adept at using sharp tools, pen plotters, wax plotters, electrostatic plotters, and eventually, Laser printers. We sent the map books to print shops for printing and binding.

How we deliver the information is so entirely different now.

What an incredible career! So what is your GIS role today? Can you describe some of your typical duties?

For the last eight years, I have managed a group of GIS Analysts in Seattle IT who support over a dozen different departments. Mine is just one of the teams supporting citywide GIS, but we are the primary interface with the customers. We try to identify what our customers need from GIS. We answer questions, get new staff situated, do a lot of projects for the departments, feed work to the other GIS teams. The other Seattle IT GIS teams handle applications development, operations, data, training and other programs and initiatives. 

I enjoy hearing about the work of our customers and how GIS can help them. A lot of my time is spent prioritizing work and matching it to staff with the right skills and availability. We often train customers to support themselves or collaborate with the many talented and dedicated GIS staff working within the departments. Each customer is a different puzzle, which makes it both interesting and challenging. I like puzzles.

When you describe GIS to a non-GIS person, how do you describe it? How do you communicate its value?

It’s easier to describe nowadays because most people are familiar with rideshare apps or Google Maps. They understand that without underlying map data, those things just wouldn’t function. I tell them we make those kinds of maps for the various city departments. But we tailor them to show what they need for their work. 

If they wonder why a common street map isn’t good enough for field workers, I tell them that there are about 1,000 authoritative layers available to City staff to mix and match. A tailored map is ideal and saves time. For instance, utilities are complex and are often buried under the street and can be hard to identify with confidence. Unless you have a map. A lot of city staff need specific addresses, customer information, etc. Everyone wants the public safety departments to arrive at a scene quickly, so I point out that GIS data and maps help them get there faster. 

The examples I point out kind of depend on where we are standing. If it’s somewhere on Earth, I can point in almost any direction at things that are examples to use to explain how varied the use of GIS can be.

What was your initial reaction to receiving the award, did you think you were in the running? 

I am nearing retirement and I’ve seen others receive the award at that stage of their lives, so it didn’t come as a complete surprise given how involved I have been with WAGISA in recent years. That said, there are too many deserving people in the GIS community to recognize them all and I just feel lucky that I was considered, let alone chosen.

Where do you keep your plaque?

I have it above my desk in my home office next to a picture of my kids.

What has been your favorite GIS project that you have been able to work on? What made it so enjoyable?

During the ten years or so that I was a full-time cartographer, I made many thousands of maps. I enjoyed the large complex projects that required multiple pages, overview maps, index pages, match lines, detail insets, legend pages, and other devices to make sense of it all. I have long said that the only thing I enjoy more than designing a map is designing an atlas!

What has been a really challenging project to work on? What made it challenging?

Working at the City of Seattle as a cartographer, I was assigned to re-create the formerly hand-drawn Water System map book using the GIS data. At the map scale of 1 inch to 400 feet, it was impossible to clearly display everything with spatially accurate GIS data. Some of the fittings were inches from the intersection. There were pipes that ran in parallel a short distance apart. Or one pipe might run directly above another. 

I needed to devise a data model for a set of alternate geometries, then I scripted up a slick editing application to create the data. Once I became the supervisor, we picked up steam as we started to create the data and annotation and detail drawings we needed for the entire water system, which went well beyond the city limits. 

I really enjoyed designing the maps and the many layers of annotation, but that project hung over my head for several years. I had a great sense of relief and satisfaction when we finally delivered the map books. Next we took on the Sewer and Drainage map books, which was another multi-year project.

Given your long and successful career, what tips or words of advice do you have for aspiring and/or new GIS professionals in 2025? Where should they start in building up their skill base and/or professional network?

1. Here are a few words of advice:

   1. If you can’t find a GIS job, see whether you can introduce GIS at the place you currently work. Make a crude map, use it to organize your work, and show it to your boss and colleagues. Not every place needs GIS maps, but a lot of places do. 

   2. Find a job at a place that uses GIS, even if you are not on that team, then forge a relationship with the GIS team. Send them map corrections or ask them to help you make a web map. There may only be a few GIS jobs, but there are other roles that use GIS. Engineers and planners and scientists are often having more fun with the GIS tools than we are!   

   3. Don’t turn your nose up at any GIS-related assignment. If you do your best work, even at boring tasks, you will be given more important and challenging work. Just get in the game, then excel!

   4. Keep good notes and documentation so you can easily train the next person to do your boring job.

   5. Do your work in iterations and phases. Make back-ups. Re-boot before you go home. 

   6. Get noticed by volunteering w/ GIS organizations, like WAGISA, then do a great job so that you will be noticed by people who know about jobs or have a role in filling them.

   7. If you don’t have the time or motivation to do a great job while volunteering, don’t bother. It’s probably because you are too busy, so just remain focused on those other parts of your life. It is counterproductive to demonstrate that your work is mediocre.

   8. Pay attention to understanding how the business works, so that you can recommend how to use GIS most effectively. This is just as important as mastering the technology. 

   9. Go to conferences and build up the courage to go to the vendor booths and ask questions. You don’t have to buy their services. Just ask them “What do you guys do?” Maybe ask them whether their customers are hiring!

   10. The Esri UC is great and inspiring, but after I got into management, I focused on local government conferences like WAGISA and the Northwest GIS User Group conferences. I have also learned a lot about the practical application of GIS at conferences conducted by NACIS, URISA, and GITA.

   11. I like to learn what others do in circumstances similar to mine. As opposed to knowing everything that one flavor of the technology can do. Both are useful and you need to become expert in technology, but remember to let the need determine the technology.

   12. Study business analysis. It’s useful. GIS Analysts are business systems analysts, which is an overlapping field.

   13. The biggest value comes when you integrate GIS with other business systems, like engineering records, customer billing, modeling software and work and asset management systems. I think of maps as the best kind of reports. Who doesn’t like a report that combines information from multiple sources?

Finally, outside of GIS, what do you like to do for fun? 

Travel, study Spanish, make music (especially playing bass guitar, singing, songwriting), soccer matches (Sounders, Ballard FC), discovering restaurants, and deep dives into culture, math, science, or music theory.

As you can read, it is obvious why Stephen was recognized as the Summit Award recipient for 2025. His journeyed career, wide knowledge and work in cultivating a generation of GIS professionals for Washington will leave a lasting impact on our field.

Stephen, thank you for all of your contributions to our community!