Bill Ball, GIS & Data Services Director

Bill Ball has worked with information technology for the last 15 years. Back in the early days of WWW, Bill was instrumental in developing the first community website for Durango in conjunction with the Region 9 Economic Development District and the Durango Area Resort Association.

Subsequent to this, working under the umbrella of Fort Lewis College, Bill coordinated several projects with the goal of bringing Internet connectivity to schools and libraries in southwest Colorado. These efforts culminated in the $5 million state/local funded project, the Southwest Colorado Interactive Learning Network (SCILnet) which brought T-1 connectivity to most high schools and libraries in southwest Colorado for the first time.

By virtue of these experiences Bill has gained expertise in project coordination, website design, back-end "data-to-web" application programming and web server administration.

In addition to being responsible for the MSI web presence, Bill believes that the emerging field of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) as applied to the WWW is very exciting in its application possiblities for MSI. In recent years, GIS science and applications have been making inroads into the online world utilizing the WWW. Since much of the data relating to mountain systems is now being created utilizing the data model provided through GIS, MSI intends to exploit these two technologies in its goal of building a storehouse of information and data relating to the San Juans.

Bill is a life-long resident of southwest Colorado. His family moved to Durango when he was 6 years old in 1957. His formative years were spent playing in the mountains around Durango, including the summer family fishing and horse packing trips into the Weminuche Wilderness, riding bikes on mountain trails (before there were mountain bikes, :-)) and competing on the Durango High School ski team.

Bill graduated from Durango High School and Fort Lewis College. He then went on to obtain a Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and a Master of Social Work degree from the Rutgers Graduate School of Social Work. He subsequently spent 10 years in the human services field before turning his interest to the online world of the WWW.

In recent years (in addition to his MSI work), Bill has been guiding wilderness-based personal growth experiences for adults.

"It's very gratifying to be able to work for an organization like MSI whose goal is to foster greater understanding and stewardship of the very mountains that contributed so much to who I am."