It became apparent after last night’s SLA meeting that many of you don’t know what the Jon Walker Awards are all about. They’ve been running now for 4 years and this year will bring us our fifth winner but we need you, our members, to support the awards for them to continue. The award is really important to us at The Society of Location Analysis for a number of reasons.
Who was Jon Walker?
Firstly, remembering Jon. So who was Jon? I’m sure some of you will remember Jon but for those of you have joined recently or who didn’t meet him, Jon was a founding member of the SLA when the idea was created in a conversation with Christine Reeves (Tesco) and Mark Teale (CBRE) many years ago. He helped form its values and philosophy, and was an active participant at the SLA meetings and social gatherings. Sadly Jon Walker passed away on the evening of Monday 22nd March 2010 after 15 months fighting cancer. The awards are a way of remembering Jon in a positive way and celebrating all that was important to him – innovation in site location, clever use of data, software development and taking his ideas into different areas, but above all exploring, learning and enjoying location analysis. That’s the most important thing – he loved what he did. You can find out more about Jon and the awards here.
Reward your colleagues and peers
So far the award has been won by Claire Dickinson of GMAP, Jack Steensta ex Abbey/Santander, Blair Freebairn of GeoLytix and Martin Clarke from the University of Leeds. You can read more about the previous winners and why they won here.
We know there are some really clever people amongst our membership and we also know that some of you are doing innovative work. We want to celebrate that, reward people who are doing some really smart and inspirational work, as well as wanting to encourage others to try out new things, work with data and build programmes and projects that help us raise the profile of location analysis.
So, finally, if you can think of someone who you think deserves this award, please nominate them. But you’ve got to be quick!
We hope to announce the winner at the next event on 14th October, which is the SLA/SPR Forum, this year entitled Right Space/Right Place?
Invitations to this will be coming out shortly but please book your place in the usual way, email info@thesla.org
It should only take a few minutes to nominate someone. Get your thinking caps on and nominate today.
You’ve only got until the end of September.
Click here to VOTE FOR INNOVATION IN SITE LOCATION TODAY – THE JON WALKER AWARD
We look forward to seeing some nominations.