Nick Kellett to present research findings at GeoIgnite 2022

Examining three years of work to combat climate change

Since he started appearing at the GeoIgnite conference in 2020, Nick Kellett, founder and CEO of Deploy Solutions, has been discussing climate change.

His company’s project for the last three years has been a research and development project aimed at helping individuals and communities deal with climate change impacts. As the project has progressed from research and interviews to the creation of software and prototypes, he has used his time at the last few GeoIgnite conferences to update the community.

This year, Kellett’s presentation Building Software Solutions for Climate Change: Closing the communication gap between citizens and trusted authorities before, during, or after a disaster,” will focus on covering key findings and discussing progress on the prototype.

“At GeoIgnite, we’ve used every year as an opportunity to showcase our research. As we began to build the prototype, once we gathered a better understanding we would use the GeoIgnite conference every year as a chance to gather our thoughts, and come up with a coherent message. Our work covers a lot of different ground, as you can imagine. It’s been a opportunity to summarize the current state of our understanding and the work that we have been doing with partners and helpers,” said Kellett. “Year after year, we have been presenting updates on that.

Kellett says that over the las three years, their presentation has evolved from simply discussing the information they had gathered, to showing off the progress of the prototype.

“The first year we said ‘hey, here’s all the people we’ve been talking to, here’s what we’ve identified as the top 10 communication problems, here’s what they said those were – in terms of their rankings, here’s our research.’ Last year, because we had started working on the actual prototype itself, we talked about that… Last year was really the first time we were able to showcase some of the work we’re doing in this area. This year, we’re updating [the community] on that.”

In addition to his presentation, Kellett is also part of the Cold Open Panel and the Diversity Leadership Panel.

While he will spend his much time during the conference teaching people about work being done to battle climate change, Kellett hopes that other groups discuss how they are jumping in to help fight back.

“I’m really looking forward to hearing, especially with the climate change focus, that there are organizations and individuals and companies such as ours that aren’t waiting to be told what to do. Instead, they’re saying ‘how do we adjust our day to day, and the direction we’re heading in, to acknowledge that there’s this crisis and that we are part of a community, and we can do things to make lives better for the people around us,” said Kellett.

He adds that he hopes people will focus less on the theory of how climate change can be addressed using geospatial data, and more on how it can be done practically.

Kellett will be presenting during the GeoIgnite: Winter Geo conference starting March. 1.

Register here to claim your free ticket to the live stream. EST