Matt, Ben and I recently traveled to visit with our longtime clients from UC Synergetic and Pike Electric at their Marietta, Georgia office to kickoff planning for the next generation of their mobile data collection app. UC and Pike play a key role in the design, construction and maintenance of electrical infrastructure throughout the U.S. We worked together on their original mobile utility monitoring and assessment toolset over 5 years ago. It's been one of their go-to, daily-use software systems since. We've done some incremental modification and enhancement along the way since then, but now it's time for a generational update to better match changing workflows and to leverage new technical opportunities (e.g. vector tiles! ... well, ok...sorta new).

This time around, we're focusing on the further extension of the tools for use across more of the UC Synergetic offices and regions. The workgroup generated lots of cool ideas for faster project setup, improved accuracy and speed in the field and for simplified reporting and production of client deliverables. With internal goals of visiting 1,000 + utility poles per person per day (!), getting good data done fast is key.

After a couple false starts, we managed to find our way to some authentic local grub and we also amused ourselves by letting Atlas Obscura (recommended!) lead us to the CDC Museum and a couple other spots on our way out of Atlanta and back to Portland.

Being that it's top of mind at the moment, we'd be pleased to share ideas or talk about practices and patterns in mobile mapping and data collection. Feel free to drop a line with any ideas or questions.