Esri Community Member Spotlight: Mele Koneya
This series of member spotlights features you and your peers here in Esri Community—the people playing a role in finding solutions, sharing ideas, and collaborating to solve problems with GIS. We’re doing this to recognize amazing user contributions, to model how Esri Community’s purpose is being brought to life, and to bring depth to this group of incredible people who may never meet in person, but who benefit from each other’s generous expertise.
Watch Mele's video interview in Kaltura
GIS in The West’s Most Western Town
Outfitted with the cowboyish motto “The West’s Most Western Town,” Arizona’s city of Scottsdale is treasured for nurturing a small-town, Western heritage even as its many modern appeals have fed population growth well beyond anything describable as “small.” Sought out for its business opportunities, schools, shopping, cultural history, recreation, residential areas, and more, Scottsdale is a wellspring of life and activity within the northern edge of the Sonoran desert and the challenging conditions a desert environment can entail.
Meeting the needs of Scottsdale’s more than 240,000 residents and the millions of visitors who stop in annually requires dependable infrastructure built on a bustling network of amenities and services. To great benefit, the city has a long history of integrating GIS into its operations which officially moved to an Esri ArcGIS framework in the early 2000s.
Scottsdale Fire – True to Their Mission for Every Event is an award-winning map and Map Gallery submission by Mele Koneya that details the crucial work of The Scottsdale Fire Department and how GIS equips them to maintain exceptional responsiveness, even during times of steep call increases.
GIS is no stranger to playing the role of behind-the-scenes hero, and it’s probably not surprising that most people in Scottsdale don’t realize the extent of geospatial information’s reach even as it touches on nearly every aspect of the services they rely on. In fact, The City of Scottsdale GIS now maintains over 130 Enterprise Feature Classes that are used by many essential city departments—from economic development, to police and fire, transportation, water, and more.
Mele Koneya (@MeleKoneya) is a GIS Analyst with The City of Scottsdale GIS, where he’s been working with their nine-person team to support Scottsdale’s GIS needs for the better part of two decades. When describing the prevalence of GIS in the city’s operations, he describes a deeply embedded relationship. “We’re very rich in data and a lot of the backbone of the city has a GIS component to it,” Mele reports.
Staying True To “We Care for You”
Virtually all aspects of city infrastructure are critical but it’s easy to argue that chief among them is public safety. It’s here that the people of Scottsdale are commendably served by the skilled men and women of The Scottsdale Fire Department (SFD), which dispatches aid from 15 individually situated stations. Together, they cover a 184.5 mile area that includes urban environments and the abutting McDowell Sonoran Preserve. Prepared to deliver everything from emergency medical response, human rescue, and fire defense, SFD also steps in to assist with more modest domestic challenges like lockouts, animal rescue, and snake removal. It’s often this multi-dimensional capability that the people of Scottsdale rely on for the protection of their lives, their property, and the surrounding environment. The SFD’s motto “We Care for You,” somehow seems to distill the fundamental level of caretaking they provide while at the same time (humbly) understate the remarkable breadth of their service.
With such a large responsibility to shoulder, the SFD needs all the advantages it can get to faithfully fulfill its mission. GIS services provided by Mele and The City of Scottsdale GIS team are a key part of that tool set. As one example, Mele shares that the locations of a full one third of the city’s fire stations were chosen using four-minute response polygons (places reachable within four minutes) and years’-worth of incident response data, enabling SFD get help to where it’s most needed more quickly.
Mele captured the exceptional work of The Scottsdale Fire Department and its intertwined relationship with GIS via a map that won a first place award from the GIS Certification Institute and was entered the 2023 Esri User Conference Map Gallery: Scottsdale Fire – True to Their Mission for Every Event. His map demonstrates that even when hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the world flock to the city during events like the Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Auction or the WM Phoenix Open golf tournament the SFD’s high standards never falter. The benefits of a geospatially-thinking-and-acting public safety force mean that they’re equipped to stay true to their mission despite steeply increased workloads that can climb from an average of 110 daily calls for assistance to nearly double that during events that multiply peak activity.
Troubleshooting ArcGIS Field Maps During Events Season
From his position within the nervous system of Scottsdale’s operations, Mele is proud to be a longtime user of Esri Community where he finds support from the global community of Esri users while solving challenges on behalf of the city. Mele has contributed hundreds of posts in the nearly fifteen years he’s made use of Esri Community and its predecessor versions, some of which include sharing his own expertise back with others to help them overcome their own obstacles.
“ A lot of that technology was new to us and because I and my co-workers are Administrators, it worked fine for us. Then we handed it off to someone else and it didn’t work for them. I was like, what are we missing here? ”
Reflecting on the value Esri Community has provided him over the years, Mele is quick to identify an example of a time the platform made it possible for his team to overcome a significant problem during the lead-up to Scottsdale’s busy 2023 event season—what he describes as a “heartburn moment.”
“During our event seasons where we were supporting our fire and police crews at the WM Phoenix Open major golf tournament in Scottsdale, we ran into some issues we weren’t aware of with a tracking view in ArcGIS Field Maps.”
Mele continues, “A lot of that technology was new to us and because I and my co-workers are Administrators, it worked fine for us. Then we handed it off to someone else and it didn’t work for them. I was like, ‘What are we missing here?’”
Halted in their tracks and unable to figure out how to get location sharing working for non-Admin users, Mele spun to Esri Community where he uploaded his question Location Sharing is Not Available. No more than a few hours had passed when Esri staff member @JustinColville spotted the comment and replied with a follow-up question. The connection was made and an hour later, Justin was able to supply the solution Mele needed.
The speed of Justin’s response and its usefulness in resolving the issue in time for the WM Phoenix Open has stuck with Mele as a point of gratitude. “It definitely saved me there,” he shares.
You Can’t Do It All By Yourself
Mele has more stories to share about times when the members and information found in Esri Community supplied information that’s made all the difference, such as Community resources on ArcGIS Experience Builder and ArcGIS Monitor that have played a role in helping The City of Scottsdale GIS team achieve big improvements in monitoring the performance of services in 2024. Also top of mind for Mele are the thorough ArcGIS GeoEvent Server Blog articles and posts by @RJSunderman that have aided the team while learning the software—supporting their ability to track more than 200 police officers and fire department staff at one time.
From participating in the ArcGIS Ideas Exchange, to information in Documents and Blog articles, to the knowledge accumulating back-and-forth of Question posts, Mele has gained a whole lot of value from Esri Community that he doesn’t want others to miss out on.
“One of the things I say to people is that you can’t do it all by yourself. There’s no way.” He advises. “I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years, but I don’t know everything. Nobody knows everything.
“The Community is important to be part of so that we can share and learn from others.”
Mele Koneya is a longtime GIS Analyst with the city of Scottsdale, Arizona where he and others on the city’s GIS team manage geospatial data for critical infrastructure and services that residents and the millions of visitors who visit the city every year rely on.