Paul Ramsey’s post about James Dixon’s beekeeper model got me thinking about how OpenGeo adds value to open source software through our design work. Paul summarizes the beekeeper model like so:
The open source community is the bee hive. The company provides care for the hive, and processes the results into the kinds of products that customers expect. In open source, as with bees, customers are not really interested in the details of production (they may even find it kind of frightening), but they are interested in the final product.
The problem with this model, as Paul points out, is that customers don’t perceive the value in the non-software activities, like design.
In fact, design is one of the important ways OpenGeo adds value. A lot of our design work falls under what Dixon calls “bee care” and involves investing resources in user experience. We do this by spearheading new user interfaces, as we did with GeoServer 2.0; actively developing new frameworks, as we are doing with GeoExt; or simply by creating common collateral for projects to consume, like the GeoSilk icon set used in both GeoServer 2.0 and GeoExt.
At the OSGeo Hacking event in Bolsena in 2008, for example, our team worked with other developers to make the GeoServer administrative interface more appealing to new users. While the GeoServer 2.0 user interface would not have resulted without the hard work of a committed community of developers, we like to think that our design work—the user experience work we did in anticipation of the event, the many sessions we had with developers in Bolsena to refine those ideas, and the web design work contributed by Chris Patterson (of The Open Planning Project, our parent organization)—went a long way towards making GeoServer 2.0 an even more appealing option for people looking to to run a solid geospatial stack with as little hassle as possible.
Similarly, we have been hard at work fleshing out GeoExt, particularly though work on an application library called GeoExplorer. Our goal is to have users be as comfortable in our GeoExt-based web applications as they are with their favorite desktop applications. To that end, we’ve researched precedents and use cases, laid out guidelines for consistent metaphors and interactions, and incorporated our standard icons. Many of these efforts are already evident in core GeoExt components. We hope that by developing GeoExt into a framework for user-friendly web-based GIS applications it can become the foundation not just for our future work, but for much of the geospatial web.
So, while some wonder why anyone would pay for free software, remember that it takes time and money to make software usable and beautiful. Investing in design is just one of the ways that OpenGeo ensures that the honey stays sweet.
launches a new dialog for configuring the map export. The result is an HTML snippet that I can include in any web page – like this one:
