OpenGeo

The Economist, in its June 6th 2009 issue article “Mapping a better world,” discusses the role maps play in effecting social change.  They seem to miss, however, how open source tools directly influence this development.  Open source mapping is not about budgeting for the non-profit with limited resources.   Rather, it provides solutions that work for all kinds of mapmakers.

The article initially captures the democratizing power of mapping:

For most people [maps are] a handy tool to find a nearby pizzeria or get directions to a meeting. But mapping technology has matured into a tool for social justice…[N]on-profit groups and individuals around the world are finding that maps can help them make their case far more intuitively and effectively than speeches, policy papers of press releases.

On the subject of the mapping software landscape, however, the article is less enlightened.  After mentioning ESRI as “the market leader in mapping software,” the author adds, almost as an afterthought, “the rise of open-source projects such as MapServer, PostGIS, and GRASS GIS have made sophisticated mapping available to non-profit groups with limited resources.”

And here the article has fallen into the common assessment that open source software is merely a cheaper version of its proprietary brethren.  Organizations, regardless of size, or for-profit status, want geospatial tools that meet their needs.  To this end, cost is often a factor, but not always the most overriding one.  With access to code, open source mapmakers can build the solution that works best for them, rather than being forced to work around a given product.

Such openness has fundamentally changed the landscape of web mapping, even helping make projects featured in The Economist article possible.  The profiled Ushahidi, makers of crowd-sourcing social activism software, promises on their website to “make [our] mapping tool available globally for free.”

In this way, a diverse range of organizational models find open software well matched for their mission of social justice.  From the Obama Administration’s Delivery on Change initiative, an interactive account of citizen action for change, to SourceMap, a platform for visualizing product supply chains, to the MarineMap Decision Support Tool, a public forum for designating the use of marine environments, organizations are choosing open source tools not because of limited resources but because “open” means the best tool for the job.

At OpenGeo, we are committed to making open source mapping a seamless experience.  With such access and ease, any organization can take their vision of a better world and map it into reality.

The developers at OpenGeo have been working with others toward an initial release of the GeoExt toolkit.  GeoExt brings together the spatial capabilities of OpenLayers with the user interface power of ExtJS.  To demonstrate the types of applications that can be built with GeoExt, we’re putting out a preview release of GeoExplorer.

The goal of GeoExplorer is to make it easy for anyone to assemble a browser based mapping application with functionality traditionally found in the desktop GIS world.  The GeoExplorer preview release includes basic layer browsing capabilities and can be placed in front of any compliant WMS.  Give the preview release a try or download it and set it up in front of your own server.

After the initial release of GeoExt, we’ll be rolling out a more feature filled version of GeoExplorer.  Upcoming releases will include a wizard for configuring a GeoExplorer application with your own layers and publishing options for embedding the app in any web page.

While explaining the OpenGeo concept to folks at Where 2.0 last week, I found myself returning over and over again to a concept, “social capital”, describing what makes OpenGeo different from a company that hires a dozen random smart people and tells them to “go learn this open source GIS stuff”.

Because the source code is open, any smart person can go into the code, and learn lots about it, and become a competent user and developer. However, a random smart developer cannot quickly gain understanding of the history of the project or social capital in the project community.

Understanding the history of the project allows developers to avoid re-hashing old conversations and old decisions. It allows them to avoid leading their clients down dead-end paths, creating code that the community will not want to use. It provides them the background to know what procedures have to be followed in order to get new code into a project, and to start the wheels turning right away (rather than at the end of a development cycle).

Social capital allows developers to short circuit time-consuming tasks by leaning on the expertise of other community members. When our vector data experts help the Geoserver raster experts with problems, it creates a social obligation, so when we come back with a raster question, we are more likely to get a quick and accurate answer.

In short, OpenGeo has open source karma, and lots of it. We hire community members who already have karma when they join us, and we give them the time to help other community members and build more karma. And in the end that pool of karma makes us much more valuable to our clients than any random smart person off the street can be.