MapBrief™

The party is over.

During the 1990s anything related to IT was expensive and fat profit margins were easily procured. Post-9/11 was very good for geospatial contracting with both the escalation of defense spending to support three wars as well as the mushrooming requirements of the Department of Homeland Security. But now sequestration–and its impacts on the DoD in particular–are the unmistakable sign that a golden era of contracting has drawn to a close.

But over the last decade another geospatial industry sprung up–the one we’re all familiar with: Internet-based, massive high-performance platforms taking full advantage of the plunging costs of computing to elevate mapping to its current status as a core component of the everyday web experience.

After a couple of decades of easy living, what would you do when confronted with the prospect of competing against lower-margin, faster-paced innovation?

You wouldn’t settle for half-measures, that’s for sure.  No, you too would get your lobbying group MAPPS busy helping draft something like H.R. 1604 “Map It Once, Use It Many Times”: a private sector takeover of Federal mapping activities in the United States.

 

US Federal Geospatial Has Always Been A Mess

No one is disputing that the problem isn’t large.  The government’s watchdog arm–the GAO–has consistently identified the same problem, over and over:

For decades, the federal government has tried to reduce duplicative geospatial data collection by coordinating GIS activities within and outside the federal government.

– June 2, 2003

But measures such as better implementation of FGDC standards and NSDI initiatives such as Geospatial One-Stop were going to fix all of that.  How did that work out?

We found that federal agencies had not effectively implemented policies and procedures that would help them to identify and coordinate geospatial data acquisitions across the government. As a result, the agencies make duplicative investments and risk missing opportunities to jointly acquire data.

– April, 2013

So MAPPS comes along with this “Map It Once, Use It Many Times.”  We should all be on our feet cheering, right? Because the narrative is so easy to buy into:

Lumbering, ineffective government bureaucracies wasting tax-payer money for decades in desperate need of the efficiency-creating skills of the private sector.

It’s a great story.

Except for one glaring, very inconvenient fact.

MAPPS Members Made Hundreds of Millions of Dollars From All of That Inefficiency, Redundancy, and Lack of Coordination

Somehow the fairy tale MAPPS is trying to sell omits the small detail that much of what their legislation claims to fix were essential features of a business model that was very, very lucrative for its members. Because where did the billions go, actually? Are there hordes of retired Park Service cartographers and USGS geodesists kicking back on their yachts in La Jolla that I don’t know about?

“Map It Once, Use It Many Times”?  After decades of the contractor game of “Capture it Once, And Sell It To As Many Different Agencies as Possible”?

So MAPPS members fancy themselves the solution to the problems that just so happened to have made them a lot of money over the years?

Got it.

Let’s dig into the details of the legislation to more fully appreciate the nobility of our White Knight Geospatial Saviors.

All Your Mapping Belongs to Us

Acronyms.  We need more acronyms.

The first order of business is to establish that National Geospatial Technology Administration (NGTA) within the US Geological Survey.  As part of the NGTA we are also establishing a National Geospatial Policy Commission (Sec 201).  The National Geospatial Policy Commission will be tasked with creating a National Geospatial Data Plan.  Of course, a National Geospatial Database will also be created (Sec 103) that will house the predictable stuff: cadastral, orthoimagery, elevation and bathymetry, etc., etc.  Additionally, other data “useful in carrying out national priorities”–healthcare, broadband, home mortgages, emergency response, and a bunch more–will be included.

What agencies’ geospatial functions will be completely taken over by the NGTA?

How about all of the geospatial functions that reside in the Department of Interior (BIA, BLM, NPS, USFWS, USGS), USDA (including Forest Service), and NOAA.

That’s a lot.

Now how might this National Geospatial Database be funded? Section 103 e(2) suggests “user fees” will be considered.  Since a vast quantity of geospatial data generated by the agencies listed above is provided free to the public, discussion of “user fees” is crazy talk, right?

Not in the MAPPS universe. These folks have openly described the attractiveness of user fees–taxes!–with respect to the use of geospatial data.

So a possible result of all of this efficiency and cost savings is that the public will end up paying for data that now is free…

 
The Gutting of the Federal Mapping Workforce

SECTION 303 CONVERSION TO CONTRACTOR PERFORMANCE.

(a) Conversion of Activities Identified by Commission- Each agency head shall convert, to the maximum extent possible, to performance by private geospatial firms, all activities identified by the National Geospatial Policy Commission for conversion under section 202(b)(2) that are performed by or for the agency.

We’ve seen this movie before.

In 1998 President Clinton signed the Federal Activities Inventory Reform (FAIR) Act that called for streamlining government by using the private sector to provide services more cheaply than government employees whenever possible.

Fifteen years in, what does the data say?

The net cost to the tax payer of a contractor is twice as much as a federal employee.

And we get to throw out institutional memory and trample what’s left of the rich mapping traditions of the USGS, NPS, etc. in the bargain.

An Industry in Desperate Need of Government Encouragement

SEC. 402 STRATEGY FOR ENCOURAGING FEDERAL USE OF PRIVATE GEOSPATIAL FIRMS.

(a) Development of Strategy- Not later than one year after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Administrator shall cooperate with private geospatial firms, and any associations composed exclusively of such firms, to develop a comprehensive strategy to encourage and enhance the use of private geospatial firms by Federal agencies and other entities that receive Federal funds, including State and local governmental agencies, universities, nonprofit organizations, and foreign governments.

It’s not enough that the private sector take over Federal mapping activities in toto–now anyone who receives government dollars will be “encouraged” to use private geospatial contractors. Because heaven forbid a university that receives Federal funds use its own cartography lab to create the campus map when there is a private firm at the ready.

Unbelievable.

But all in the name of free enterprise, of course.

 
Yet the Free Market is Massively Investing in Spatial Data Infrastructure

You would never know from reading MAPPS press releases that right now, in 2013, in the United States of America, some notable companies are making sizable investments in spatial data: Google, Microsoft, Apple, and even Amazon.

National Spatial Data Infrastructure?  That would be Google to the average citizen.

Isn’t this the joy of capitalism writ large?  Private companies risking private capital to invest millions in mapping and create a massive consumer surplus that gives joy every time you turn on your smartphone?

What MAPPS intentionally confuses is their pro-business stance with the principles of free markets.  Because as Luis Zingales so memorably puts it, “true capitalism lacks a strong lobby“.

 

If You’re Part of the Problem, Perhaps You Should Have a Lesser Role in the Solution

No one disputes that government IT and its procurement systems are broken.  But the solutions put forth by H.R. 1604 simply aren’t credible given the two decades-long track record of heavy contractor involvement in federal geospatial activities.  Recent innovative projects the FCC and National Park Service offer glimpses of the alternative paths available when agencies don’t reflexively cede control of their projects to outside vendors. Because frankly, the technology is the easy part: it’s the anthropology–the organizational culture–that’s difficult. For far too long the upper management at these agencies has rubber-stamped increasingly cumbersome technology from private contractors seemingly optimized to create and perpetuate prolonged organizational dependency.

*    *    *    *    *    *

Admittedly, whinging at the mendacity of a lobbying group does have a rather pronounced tilting-at-windmills feel to it.  If MAPPS is vigorously representing the interests of their members, so be it, right?  But what this proposed legislation makes abundantly clear is that these members–Sanborn, ESRI, Hexagon, et al–have such a dispiriting, narrow vision of their future: utterly backwards looking; taxpayer-be-damned, Federal-employee-be-damned.

What remains unclear is if this baldly retrograde expression of self-interest will be countered with anything other than servile, silent assent by the industry at large.

 
 
 
—Brian Timoney

 
 
 

 

 

How much should citizens pay a county for a digital copy of property records and aerial photos?  Sciotto County, Ohio says $2000.  Actually it hired Woolpert to figure it out for them, and they said $2000.  Which sounds a bit spendy, especially given that cities like Philadelphia and Denver give away the same type of information. For free.  Such a discrepancy in pricing would indicate someone is doing it wrong.  But Sciotto County went to the trouble of arguing their point to the Ohio Supreme Court where six of the seven judges agreed with them.

Others have pointed out the wrongness of the decision. But what if the majority’s conclusion flowed from premises about the relationships between data, software, and distribution formats that simply don’t apply in 2013?  To what degree should a citizen be economically punished for the technical inefficiency of its government?

What if It’s More Cost-Effective To Give Data Away Than To Charge For It?

The costs of distributing digital information over the web have plunged dramatically over the past few years:  the infrastructure to, say, distribute aerial imagery of a city, would have cost thousands annually–now it’s probably a few dollars per month.  But while distribution costs have plunged, employee costs haven’t: wouldn’t efficient government dictate that that data dissemination be as automated as possible, without the costly frictions of employees processing paperwork and money? To which the gatekeepers of closed data gravely utter the phrase “cost recovery”.

Are You Recovering Costs Or Merely Acting Out an Accounting Fiction?

The conversion of paper records to digital data was a large expense:  this was an era when databases and GIS programs required their own specialized hardware (kids, google “Sun Sparc”).  So naturally jurisdictions wanted to get some of that expense back by charging the public for derivative products–printed maps, as well as data files on floppies, CD-ROMs, etc.  And with money changing hands comes paperwork and the legal licensing and disclaimers: in a word, overhead.  The city of Denver stepped back and evaluated their data sales program, and concluded they weren’t making real money because–

• a large number of data sales were to city contractors, who turned around and billed the city for their outlay
• the license for the data was so restrictive that 3rd party usage options were severely limited
• besides processing paperwork, employees spent significant time walking purchasers through the process of FTP download

In short, if someone wants to play the “cost recovery” card as an economic rationale for selling government data let’s open up the books and get a full accounting of employee time spent processing paperwork, hand-holding over the phone, and determining if a contractor is simply adding another cost to the bill leaving the net gain from the sale at less than zero.

License-Free Publishing Without Vendor Baggage

Another important piece of the value puzzle is having effective, low-cost publishing platforms. A project with impressive traction is the open source publishing platform CKAN.  Already used around the world by governments of all levels, the US recently announced that CKAN will be powering the next version of Data.gov, including Geo.Data.gov.  Such a critical mass of usage means that the cycles of iterative innovation will be difficult for any commercial vendor to keep pace with.  The City of Chicago is taking an even simpler tack by posting datasets on Github.

Github as A Potent Accelerant For Tools and Best Practices

Github?

Isn’t that a website where dorks post programming code?

Yes and no. Yes, code is posted, but that isn’t why some consider it a more potent social force than Facebook or LinkedIn. Clay Shirky lays out some far-reaching implications of the Git architecture that go way beyond being simply a code repository.  Sure, large open source projects such as CKAN are freely accessible, but just as important are all manner of “glue” tools to build bridges for information out of proprietary systems.  Here in Colorado we have the OpenColorado data catalog based on CKAN.  But available too is a suite of tools is available on Github to automate the transfer of data out of the ESRI eco-system.  It’s not just about lowering the sticker price of data publishing, but also lowering the level-of-effort so that it’s more cost-effective to push your information to the commons than any one-off custom in-house solution.  With such an efficient platform for best-practices dissemination, small jurisdictions such as Sciotto County, Ohio are no longer dependent on the technical savvy of their in-house personnel (or the mixed motives of Woolpert),

Do You Believe In Economic Multiplier Effects?

Of course you do, especially if you own a smart phone.  Because in 2000, when the US turned off the “selective availability” that intentionally degraded GPS accuracy (yes, Al Gore was involved!) you and I did not have GPS-enabled phones.  Think of all of the businesses and services that use GPS that didn’t exist in 2000?  One consultant’s report estimates the direct economic impact of GPS in the US to be a cool $67 billion per year.

The last refuge of the zealous closed-data bureaucrat reluctant to release datasets to the public is “what would they use it for anyway?”  Parcels and foreclosure lists have obvious economic benefits, but fire hydrants? But given a critical mass of reliably updated datasets, who can predict what economically important insights will be gleaned in the near future, especially with the advent of the sensor web.

Consider the City of Denver’s experience: the 75% reduction in phone calls for assistance in purchasing and downloading data was predictable.  But what has surprised the Open Data backers has been the tangible increase in interdepartmental efficiency.  You know the drill: mid-level person in Department A emails mid-level person in Department B looking for data.  Department B person asks her boss; boss tells her to ask Department A what they want the data for, etc., etc., ad nauseum.  Now communication is limited to a single email response, a hyperlink, and “have a nice day.”  New York City, an early pioneer in the Open Data Movement, has a team dedicated to analyzing seemingly disparate datasets to tally everything from how many trees were lost to Hurricane Sandy (9,662) to which restaurants were clogging the sewers with illegally dumped cooking grease.  It turns out that unclogging a city’s data flows actually unclogs its sewers: who knew?

*   *   *   *   *   *   *

With three of the US’ five largest cities (New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia) making clear, credible commitments to Open Data, such everyday “victories” will become more commonplace. The Governor of New York recently launched a state-wide open data catalog along with an Executive Order to state agencies to publish data further nudging a “critical mass” of information that opens up opportunities for using data in creative, unforeseeable ways. Given these large-scale commitments, and the technology platforms highlighted above, it’s increasingly obvious that in an environment of restricted government spending few jurisdictions will be able to continue down the economically irrational path of keeping information collected at the taxpayers’ expense walled off from the public.

 

 
—Brian Timoney

When recently writing about the shortcomings of map portals, many of my opinions were shaped by the map usage analytics I collected from the City of Denver that formed my most popular post of 2012.  Given the popularity of the topic and the large volume of feedback, I circled back to gather more statistics not only from Allan Glen in Denver, but also Jason Birch in Nanaimo, as well a project in Centennial, Colorado that I modeled after Jason’s approach to property information.

And what I found strengthens the case against map portals.

You’re Missing Half Your Audience

One of the major short-comings of map portals  is that by jamming a variety of layers into a single interface, it’s very difficult to elicit a user’s intent.  Think of how much “smarter” the web is when comparing the Yahoo homepages of the late 1990s with Google’s fast auto-complete text box of 2013.  We fully expect Google to find us the needle in the haystack, yet our map portals do about as well as anticipating what we’re looking for as the old Yahoo home page (which, among those of us north of 40, was regarded with wonder–it’s where we started our online day…!).  Because Nanaimo, Denver, and Centennial all actively use SEO for their geographic content it’s much more search-engine friendly than layers locked away in portals.  Last year we found that 60% of all Denver map traffic came from Google searches: that has risen to be closer to 70%.  Meanwhile, Nanaimo rings in at 60%, while the newest initiative in Centennial is already 50% of map traffic.  (When we say “Google” we mean all search engines, of which Google accounts for > 90% of traffic).

But here’s the important part: these are feature-specific searches. People don’t go looking for map interfaces or map layers, they Google specific addresses, specific school names, specific libraries, etc.

FACT: If you’re geographic data is not Google-able at a feature-level of specificity, you’re missing half your audience

Most People Are Looking for A Single Feature. Then They Leave.

Websites like to brag about how “sticky” they are:  the amount of time spent on the site, how many pageviews generated, etc.  If you’re providing the public information, you are not in the business of being “sticky”: provide what the user is looking for as quickly as possible and let them leave.  And we can see this in the Nanaimo stats.  Jason was one of the first to push the principles of REST for geographic data, and it lets us see the 65% of all users retrieve a single bit of information and leave.  Only 12% of users browse information for more than three geographic features during a single visit.  The vast majority aren’t visiting a public government website to spend time interacting with maps, toggling layers, and clicking on dozens of placemarks.

If you have a cynical cast of mind, you could be thinking “maybe Nanaimo’s content is so useless and confusing people bail right away?”  To that I say, over 10% of their map usage comes from bookmarks and emailed hyperlinks.  Because every feature has its own unique URL, it’s much easier to save and pass around.  Can individual features in your map portal be bookmarked and passed around?

 

People Who Ended Up Interacting With A Map, Didn’t Go Looking For A Map

Denver’s Recreation Centers map had over 7000 visits in January.  But only 1% of keyword searches that led users to the Recreation Centers map included the words “map”, “location”, or “find”.  So even in their Google searches users aren’t thinking “map”, yet on average they end up having three interactions with the map per visit.  This is more damning evidence against the idea of putting all your geographical information inside a single portal and labeling it “MAP”.

Don’t Make People Find Maps, Put Them Where People Already Visit

The City of Denver’s web GIS team is in an enviable position: not only do they have the solid evidence of the traffic-enhancing presence of maps, they have an embeddable-widget architecture that lets them easily embed map content anywhere on the city’s website (as well as third-party websites).  Most of us have to wrangle with our organization’s jack-booted HTML thugs “web team” to get a single 8pt-font hyperlink on the home page. So when the Presidential election was approaching, they looked at the web stats and saw, unsurprisingly, that the Election Commission homepage was where the majority of the search traffic landed.  Guess what happened when they temporarily embedded a polling location map in that homepage? Election Day and the 24 hours prior blew the doors off of all preceding map usage records.

Beautiful things happen when maps are liberated from the Geo Silo.

The New Marching Orders: Optimize For Single-Feature Search & Retrieval

We already knew that single-topic maps create three times more traffic than the all-in-one portal.  This latest round of metrics clearly shows that users want maps that quickly focus them on a single, particular feature of interest.  Not only do we have to break our portals down and give the most important layers their own maps, we need to enable the user to rapidly pluck out that lone feature that they’re interested in from your haystack of content.  Following the Nanaimo playbook (turn on the ‘notes’) of using REST principles to make every individual feature index-able and bookmark-able, you harness the power of search engines to enable easy discovery and drive traffic to your maps.

As I showed in a previous post, a minimally-viable lookup service based on this individual-feature philosophy can be rolled out at a very low cost.

Next-level flexibility with embeddable map widgets a la Denver enables placing maps where folks naturally end up in searching for information.  This is a positive feedback loop in high gear as you’re capturing a significant audience of people who didn’t even know they wanted to interact with a map.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

Geographic communication is less about technology and more about anthropology: understanding our audience instead of being preoccupied with our tools is what will enable us to rightfully command a position of relevance in the Information landscape.

 

 

 
—Brian Timoney