The Fifty States Initiative's goal is to engage all the states in the development of the NSDI. Funding is available from FGDC Cooperative Agreement Program (CAP) and USGS, plus some partnership opportunities. New CAP grants are coming for 2007 for strategic and business planning. They open in early November and submissions can be made until Jan 19 with selected proposals announced by March 1.

Wisconsin's 2005 project was awarded to the Wisconsin Land Information Assoication to develop a statewide GIS strategic plan. The 2006 project went to the I Department of Administration to establish a GIS Council. A PhD student at UW-Madison collected information on eight state councils to act as a starting point. Those documents will be available on the Department of Administration website. The council plan will be developed in the coming months with the council to be operational by mid-2007.

Wyoming's project involved developing a strategic plan. An initial recommendation was updated with a user survey garnered the support of the CIO. Statewide coordination, notes the state coordinator, is fundamentally different from state government coordination. Statewide coordination was something he felt the team needed to sell. Interestingly, a wiki for developing the document did not work well.

The state of the Fifty States Initiative is best reviewed via a survey done in the last few months. It's available via the NSGIC website and is based on the 9 criteria for a state coordinators, the effectiveness of statewide coordination councils, and the success of local/tribal implementations.

There are nine criteria for successful state coordinators. Oregon, VT and New York, New Jersey have all nine criteria met! My state of Massachusetts had but two. Several states noting losing some capabilities, and since 2004 overall, we've lost capabilities.

The effectiveness of statewide coordination councils has seven characteristics. Four states have no strategic plans, 10 under development. 21 have no business plans 17 are in development. 43 states have no marketing plan 5 have them under development. Eight councils are fully funded 7 are partially funded 21 are not funded. 16 get state funds, 13 use federal grants, other use bonds, state special funds, membership fees and other modes. Fifteen states have no standards on the Web.

There are seven characteristics for measuring successful implementations for sate/local and tribal agencies. These include data sharing agreements, published lists of data stewards (20 states have no list online), data distribution policies, clearinghouse nodes, harvested by GOS (30 are). Thirty-four states participate in The National Map.