ConnectUp with Phil Mielke

Today I participated, remotely, in a ConnectUp discussion with Phil Mielke. ConnectUp is a series of roundtable discussions with experienced employees from across Esri. A group called e-bloc coordinates these discussions in addition to other events serving to connect employees in more social settings.

Phil Mielke is currently an Industry Patterns Lead with the Patterns and Practices team at Esri, and is the former CIO of Redlands. His bio from ConnectUp is below:

Phil grew up working on farms in very (very) rural Indiana. He was an undergrad student when GIS became his passion. Earning Degrees in Biology and Philosophy, Phil’s first 1000 maps were of animal home range tracking for the Wisconsin DNR. He digitized the 5 counties surrounding Dayton working for a regional Planning agency, and won an award from the AAG for Crime Analysis. After a stint as a commercial fisherman in Alaska, Phil moved to Redlands to work as an analyst and research coordinator on the National Institute of Justice’s COMPASS Program (Community Mapping, Planning and Analysis for Safety Strategies) where the first regional crime database was developed and shared with the public through a public mapping application. Phil was hired after the program ended as a Crime Analyst, became a GIS Supervisor and then CIO for the City of Redlands. During his tenure, he led implementation of an advanced citywide GIS winning several awards and led directors and council through several GeoDesign workshops for Capital Improvement and Planning. Philip also developed a crime analysis training course, trained dozens of police departments and several federal intelligence entities and devoted his MSGIS research for the tracking of Violent Sex and Gang Offenders with GPS anklets (leading to the first arrest based on GPS anklets). Phil has a passion for theater and music, having played and recorded with several groups. His band, All Marbles, can be found on Spotify, iTunes or dive bars in SoCal. Phil’s married to Jessi Mielke (also an Esri employee), and has 2 kids, Adelaide and Josephine (who don’t work at Esri yet, but their drawings are promising).

I was very interested to hear about Phil’s background in animal home range tracking using GIS. In his conversation, he mentioned that much of the analysis techniques for crime mapping come from wildlife biology. He didn’t touch on this again, as he transitioned to talking about his recent work with Esri developing playbooks for GIS use according to industry, but I am interested in learning more about this connection between wildlife biology and crime mapping

Phil had an interesting career pathway, as he moved to Esri after working for the City of Redlands as a GIS Specialist and Supervisor. He spoke briefly about the challenge of transitioning from practical project management in city government, to the more research-institute feel of Esri due to their industry monopoly. He noted that city government felt more practical, because GIS problems had clear deadlines, that were often short, and saw implementation in local government. I thought this was an interesting note. He recommended that, to find success at Esri, you have to “find the right way to become personally invested” in this GIS utopia.

He then stepped us through some industry playbooks, which did outline interesting case studies of using the ArcGIS Platform in different industries. I would have enjoyed more discussion about concrete problem solving, but at least this provided an interesting example of a long-term pathway of using GIS, across different environments and use cases, all of the way to current work with Esri.

• An example of GIS use in the city of Redlands, around the time Phil Mielke worked there.