The work between the standards

Some of the most useful knowledge in NG9-1-1 lives in somebody’s brain.

It is then buried in a vendor call, a conference convo, a private message, or a document that never made it beyond one agency. Someone solves a strange schema problem in California. Someone else writes a script in Oregon. A GIS specialist in Delaware spends three days interpreting one sentence in a standard.

Then the next person starts over.

I’m building The Aggregation Point because this work deserves a public memory.

It is a vendor-neutral community for the people who build, maintain, troubleshoot, and depend on NG9-1-1 GIS data. A place to ask the oddly specific question. Compare how different jurisdictions handle the same requirement. Share a script. Document the solution before it disappears into another meeting.

Anyone can read it. Participation requires an account, but access to the knowledge does not.

Yes, I am also building a business

I want to be transparent about that.

Right now, I am a student and GIS professional building my way through entrepreneurship. Groundtruth 911 is where I am developing practical tools for this field. Some may eventually become commercial products.

The Aggregation Point is not a Groundtruth customer forum. It is not a sales funnel wearing a community costume. It has its own domain, identity, rules, and vendor-neutral structure. Products can be discussed when they are relevant to the work, but nobody gets to turn the forum into a showroom, including me.

Would it be dishonest to say that building this community will not help me?

Yes.

I expect to learn. I hope to build relationships. I want to understand the problems practitioners are actually facing before I decide I know how to solve them. That knowledge will make me better at building useful products later.

But there is a meaningful difference between participating in a field and extracting from it.

My commitment is that the community should remain useful to someone who never buys anything from me.

Starting with something useful

The first public beta being shared through the community is the free NENA Schema Converter.

It is an ArcGIS Pro toolbox that currently supports:

• NENA-STA-006.1.1-2020 to NENA-STA-006.2a-2023
• NENA-STA-006.2a-2023 to NENA-STA-006.3-2026
• The flat-file Esri File Geodatabase model

The converter creates a new output, leaves the source data unchanged, uses explicit schema maps, and produces both a readable log and a detailed conversion manifest.

It is a converter, not a validator. It does not certify that data is compliant, complete, or ready for production, and a schema conversion does not establish NENA conformance.

The beta includes fictional sample data. Testing with your own authorized data is welcome, but not required. There is no signup gate and no email required to download it. Anyone using operational data should test a copy, review the output, and sanitize anything shared publicly.

This is the first real-world public testing round, which is exactly why I am releasing it as a candidate rather than calling it finished. I want the weird fields, incomplete exports, local conventions, and edge cases that simulated data cannot reproduce.

You can download v0.9.0-rc1 from GitHub. Use the community beta thread for questions and patterns that other testers may benefit from. Use GitHub Issues for structured test results and bugs that need to be tracked.

What I hope this becomes

The converter is my contribution. I hope other people bring their tools eventually.

Scripts. Templates. Field calculations. Checklists. Documentation. Small tools that solved one stubborn problem and might save someone else a week.

Not everything needs to become a product. Sometimes the right answer is a twelve-line script, freely shared by the person who got tired of doing the same thing manually.

The Aggregation Point is an experiment in what happens when more of that work becomes visible, searchable, and reusable.

I will be there as myself. I will share what I am building, say when I do not know something, and be honest about where the community ends and my commercial work begins.

If you work anywhere near NG9-1-1 GIS, come take a look.

Ask the weird question. Test the converter. Share the thing you built because you were annoyed.

Let’s stop making the next person start from zero.

The NENA Schema Converter is not endorsed by or affiliated with NENA or Esri.