map butcher

DANGER DANGER DANGER – THIS VIDEO CONTAINS GEOPROFANITY

FOSS4G 2009. Done. I’m just starting to reflect on where things are since the last time I was at a FOSS4G.

I loved Ignite Spatial when I was at the conference this year – such a refreshing format and it felt like GIS without the beards and elbow patches. My friend the north shore telly tubby gave an great presentation and whilst it was tongue in cheek I thought it was relevent to the plenaries delivered at FOSS4G.

Representing Government, Warwick Watkins, Richard Marles and Kate Lundy were asking for help in their quest to modernise and become 2.0 certified – all good governments need a liberal dash of 2.0. Andy Pitman gave us a stark reminder of the bigger picture and shed light on the climate modelling communities challenges (some of these challenges are perhaps self inflicted). In general many GIS customers are looking at ways to deliver more on smaller and smaller budgets. Thunderbirds to the rescue – or rather geo geeks to the rescue. The open-source community, projects and businesses have much to offer, however one of the greatest challenges will be how to bridge what I sense to be a large gap in the picture – a community built on self help and self organisation, generating these innovations  - and a world not ready for them. There appears to be a some sort of translation missing between these two worlds.

People willing to translate  this chaotic open source world are slowly emerging. They are focused on knocking down the barriers to mass participation, presenting sensitive support models where customers can take the option of paying when they need that extra leg up or be essentially rewarded for being self sufficient and independent. This builds loyalty, trust and continuity in a customer base. There is a growing body of evidence which makes open-source geospatial technology much more palatable to traditionally risk averse organisations. Whilst the cloud is very ‘now’ both research and development by the likes of 52North and actual implementations by CampToCamp have proven how the ‘open-source’ stack within the cloud can robustly scale – this seems to be a major step forward. open-source Geospatial technology is appearing in the enterprise – a space traditionally occupied by the large propietary GIS vendors.

Amongst many very good presentations Paul Ramsey painted his vision of the future – ‘beyond nerds bearing gifts’, but how can this community manage to reach out to the other world? Perhaps OSGeo can learn lessons from the very work that goes on within its technical ranks? Just as the low level open source libraries are abstracted and wrapped for higher consumption so too should the message – It may sound dishonest but perhaps OSGeo needs to wrap this open source geospatial world in order to sell its virtues and benefits to those who don’t come naturally to its ideas and concepts. Open-source software may not be for lazy people however its success are in some way dependent upon it solving peoples problems efficiently and maintaining a reasoned cost point in all senses.

Beware of nerds bearing gifts perhaps? With such a strong focus on the technology will these new world vendors loose sight of what it is they’re here to do – will the technology eclipse its very purpose? Its hard to see this happening with such strong moral motivation however this is, after all business.

There was also a growing feeling that the walls between the proprietary and open source vendors are crumbling. Is there a place for us all in this new world order? Apparently so according to Dale Lutz, (make sure you click here for a good reason to keep your web page uptodate!!!!) this is the ‘end of religion’.

Many of the delegates at FOSS4G have stories of technical successes – ‘I made X package work with Y library and I hacked at Z to do it’. OSGeo presents the impressive commit figures. Some presentations have shed light on real world challenges which have been solved by toolkits and frameworks of one kind or another. But the bottom line is when the open-source geospatial technology becomes the enabler. For me it is the case studies and real world examples which will underpin the wider adoption of open source geospatial technology. I’ll leave this post with a thought from Paul Ramsey’s plenary  - we are still in the early stages of an evolution rather than some overnight revolution. It would appear we’re not about to be consumed by an open-source geospatial Tsunami. (although at times I look at OpenLayers and wonder)