On the 25th of March, 2022, we hosted the maiden edition of the conversation series on Twitter – “Creative Side Hustles for Geospatial”.
The objective of these discussions is to bring together individuals who use geospatial technology outside of their day job in a variety of creative ways, and also to inspire others who may have a hunger for exploring what other things they may be able to do using their geospatial skills.
On our first episode, we had:
- Keir DuBois, Professional Designer & Artistic Cartographer of Keirtography,
- Maxime Lenormand, Host of Minds Behind Maps podcast,
- Dr. Tubolayefa Warekuromor, Freelance Geospatial Consultant.
Starting off, we talked about their various backgrounds and how each of them first got into geospatial.
Maxime is a Geospatial Data Scientist at Overstory by day, and a Podcaster by night and he has been in the industry for quite some time getting into the Space industry from a Mathematician and Engineer’s perspective.
Keir has been a creative design professional since 2004, held production and leadership roles at local agencies before launching Keirtography in 2020, a side hustle for making map art and creative world-building. However, Keir has enjoyed free-hand map drawing in social gathering.
Tubolayefa works as an Information Management Officer at the United Nations Resident Coordinator’s Office (UNRCO), carries out freelance research within diverse sectors applying geospatial technology.
Major pointers and tips we learned from all three of them are:
- Get started! When the project kicks off, you’ll learn a lot of things on your way – Maxime
- Be an advocate for yourself – Maxime
- Seek inspiration outside of your current niche – Keir
- Begin with something you already love to do and possibly do for free – Keir
- It would be useful to not care about what others think about what you create at the beginning but focus on doing it consistently – Keir
- Be visible and create relationships – Tubolayefa
- Be a part of Associations & Professional bodies, attend events and talk about what you do! – Tubolayefa
- Look forward creating value, that’s what you sell – people pay for value – Maxime
This was certainly an enjoyable conversation and we look forward to others. We would say go and have a listen but Twitter being Twitter gave us only 30 days for the replay which was listened to by over 200 persons.
We hope you join us at the next one!
With much love,
Esther & Omowonuola