Land Surveyor Blogs

This semester, I am taking a comprehensive advanced business plan writing course, in which I am writing the plan for the long awaited new platform for Land Surveyors United.  As most of you know by now, my dad Skip Farrow passed away last June and because this network is something that we built together, I have been doing a lot of work on my own in attempts of getting the new site up and running.  While doing so a lot of time has been spent digging up pages and archived information about the site to create a more comprehensive and understandable reason for why we are all here.  For example, tonight I stumble across a page archived long ago which told the story of our community philosophy circa 2010 and I thought it might be interesting to see what you all think of it today.  

 I am going to share it as it was written then and if you are interested, share your thoughts on how much has changed in the industry in the past 8 years

As a kid, I spent the majority of my time outside of school working in a reprographics shop owned by my father where surveyors and engineers were in and out all day. Somewhere along the line, I learned a lot about the needs of surveyors in getting their work done. At times, I worked really hard to help him meet deadlines by assisting with blueprinting, delivering and servicing equipment or whatever was necessary to get the job done. As an adult and college graduate, I found myself gravitating back to this feeling of obligation and commitment to the surveying industry, but why?Anthropology.

Surveyors Need More than a Sounding Board.  They need a Community

In 2007, when I started building LSU, my goal was to reach a critical mass of activity amongst the members i had. My goal was to build slowly, for example I hoped for 5000 interactions per month at this time, because Land Surveyors United had only 100 members. But in the future I projected 25,000 interactions when LSU came to 500 members. At this point I began to finally start looking around at other social networks for possible ways of 'generating' interactivity and discussions, but discovered quickly that nothing these other communities were driven by could ever power a serious network of professional land surveyors. And because no such online environment existed for surveyors, I had nothing else to work with or compare my vision to and thus, no other source of inspiration. The only online destinations where surveyors could congregate at this time were lacking the features that surveyors so desperately needed.  And with the advent of social media, someone needed to assume the responsibility of enlightening surveying professionals in the industry to the multitude of ways in which social tools can be used for building reputation and supporting one another online. I assumed that position.  My inspiration would have to be based upon my own list of objectives. Those objectives were fuel by anthropology, not advertising.Surveyors communicate in highly specific ways- and those ways are not typical to other online social networks.  I began to move away from the whole idea of building a "social network" for land surveyors and began to gravitate more towards a network built on "social support". Therefore I decided that a transformation of a social network environment into a social support system was the way to proceed with building a global community.   Land Surveyors United should always be free to the individual surveyor and geospatial community because (in my opinion) surveyors should not have to pay for the following: