Joseph Barreca

            Jack Francis put me on the map in 1974.  I never really saw this map.  It was reportedly behind his desk in the Republic Forest Ranger’s office and had the locations of all the hippies that had moved into Ferry County on it.  Back-to-the-Landers were not exactly welcomed at first.  But after a couple of winters, people get used to seeing your face in town and you become local in a basic sort of way. 

            A lot went on in those first 10 years.  We started the Ferry County Food Coop.  I created a set of notched cards with names and addresses for 500 organic farmers and food stores.  We used that to organize Tilth, Washington’s organic farming organization.  The first energy crisis arrived.  We started Northeast Washington Alternative and Creative Technologies, NEWACT.  We held workshops on solar and wind energy.  We had newsletters and a library.  Personal computers were becoming available.  I borrowed some money and bought a KayPro for $1500.  It was portable, had a little 9 inch green screen and floppy disks.  I ran it on solar power in my first underground house.

            Pretty soon I was teaching classes and programming databases.  The thing about computers is not the cool software and hardware.  They are old before they get to the store.  Computers really are better for organizing and communicating a lot of information than anything you can do manually.  Over the same period the people who published the Whole Earth Catalog moved on to the Co-Evolution Quarterly and then to Wired Magazine.  I followed a similar route. 

            Stevens County offered me a job computerizing its Assessor’s Office.  I took the office from being completely manual to being completely digital over about 7 years, learning every job in the office along the way.  I became familiar with appraising, personal property, industry, taxes, history and government.  Almost every bit of information you deal with in local government has ties to the land.  To make government work intelligently, you need to build a Geographic Information System.  A GIS connects names and numbers to points and lines on a map.  You can stack layers of a virtual world together and discover connections between them. 

            The Assessor’s Office was not going in that direction in 1995, so I started a mapping business of my own, Map Metrics, (www.mapmet.com) and helped create the base data to bring enhanced 911 to the four counties in North Eastern Washington along the Canadian Border.  In some counties, we had to create completely new addressing systems based on mileage instead of mail box numbers.

            Fire, Police and Ambulance Services needed maps to go to the new addresses.  We made map books for them.  Many other people wanted these books too.  The 911 business faded, but maps remain important to everyone.  They can reveal the stories of the rocks as in our geologic atlases, the stories of animals and people as in our old towns project (http://www.mapmet.com/Oldtowns/OldtownMap.htm), or the future of the environment.   With so many possibilities, you need to focus.  My focus has become the upper Columbia region.

            Look at any small place hard enough and you will see the whole world.  You will also see that no one person can portray it or comprehend it all.  Every road and creek has a name, every name a story, every story a time and place that ties it to a dozen more.  All of us have something to add to this virtual world.  Learning how to collaborate in sharing our parts of that world is the challenge for myself and Map Metrics today (http://wiki.theheritagenetwork.org/index.php/Main_Page).  Meanwhile, printed maps are still my bread and butter.  Buy a few.  Start exploring.  Share your stories.