OpenGeo

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.