For the first time, the NGA held its annual gathering for the spy agency’s technology contractors in the Cortex district, a bustling tech hub that’s a far cry from the gated NGA campus hidden among the factories of the south riverfront.
The Geospatial Technology Exchange, or GEOx, was a joint effort of Cortex and the NGA that not only convened the companies that do business with NGA but invited area students and the public to drop in. The public could view exhibits showing the technology used by NGA to make sophisticated maps, and business and government officials talked about the state of the industry.
NGA Director Robert Cardillo was even in town Tuesday and gave a speech on the agency’s future to attendees.
Cortex President Dennis Lower said Tuesday that the event was a big deal.
“As technology innovation becomes more deeply ingrained in our region’s DNA, the addition of GEOx will bring an annually recurring event that will help make metro St. Louis a hub for geospatial technologies,” Lower said in a statement.
How NGA interacts with the region is an important topic now that St. Louis is looking to the agency to help catalyze urban renewal in a portion of the city that has suffered from neglect and disinvestment for decades.
Construction could start as soon as next year on the agency’s new $1.75 billion western headquarters across the street from the abandoned Pruitt-Igoe site, the infamous public housing project that has become a symbol of sorts for the decline of St. Louis over the last 50 years.
Not only has NGA said it will move its 3,100 employees to north St. Louis, but Cardillo has indicated that it doesn’t want to be under the radar anymore. He has said one of the main reasons he decided to keep NGA in the city rather than move to land near Scott Air Force Base is to stay close to tech centers such as Cortex.
“This is where we need to be, out here in the open,” said NGA spokesman David Berczek.
Three NGA employees work in the Cortex district now, and the agency hopes to boost that number to about 15 by year’s end, Berczek said.
The event is usually just for contractors and held on NGA’s south St. Louis campus. To host a networking conference for mapping technology entrepreneurs, it made sense to locate it in the bustling tech district it is building a relationship with, Berczek said.
And what’s a networking conference without a cocktail hour? You can do that on private property in Cortex, he added. Alcohol is a no-no on a federal intelligence installation.
©2016 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
