MapBrief™

Of course you’re special.

I merely invite you to consider the possibility that it’s your project goals that may not be terribly…unique.

And that the smartest guy in the room is the room.

Because the room is smarter than both you and your developer,  it’s worth investigating whether someone has largely solved your problem already and made it (freely) available.  Of course there will be custom tweaking; it’s the wholesale wheel-reinvention many of us see every day that is objectionable and so often the product of tunnel-visioned project management and/or feckless developer-think.

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A long-time client was pondering whether to replace their 10-year old website that is a mountain of crufty legacy PHP code, partly to become smarter about serving up content to different user types and partly to liberate them from the burden of a custom-everything codebase that I’ve assured them no new developer really wants to dive into and figure what is going on.

Hence a CMS.  Having developer friends working to good effect with Drupal, we quickly determined it met the core needs of the client and was as plug-and-play as could be expected.  While the client certainly dug the ‘free’ aspect of Drupal being an open source, the clincher was the assurance that any time they could find ten Drupal developers in Denver off of Craigslist who could quickly troubleshoot problems, extend functionality, etc., without the delay and cost of wading through ten years of accumulated one-off code.  (With DrupalCon in Denver this week we can only hope a few more users/developers will have a look around and decide life next to the Rocky Mountains is sweet indeed).

            Harnessing code backed by a community bestows Walden-esque serenity

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Another interesting dimension of the community code story appeared this week in a post on the FCC blog.  Like a number of .gov sites, it too runs on Drupal, and includes a number of maps created with TileMill and served up by MapBox.  All to the good, but in creating a specialized module to integrate these maps into their Drupal site, they’ve contributed said module back into the Drupal community.  (The range of FCC mapping efforts utilizing geospatial open source software will be prominent at the upcoming FOSS4G-NA conference coming up in a couple of weeks in Washington DC.)

Set aside the particular use case for a moment.  As a taxpayer, having government entities efficiently use proven community-based technologies and contribute their own custom extensions back into the commons strikes me as very much in the spirit of the public good.

Whether the setting is public or private, the odds of pulling off a successful IT project have always been longer than either software vendors or consultants would ever cop to.  With the maturation of the online commons it would be foolish not to do your homework investigating whether there is not already a well-trod path laid down by others in the direction of your project’s goals.

—Brian Timoney

During the late 15th century heyday of Portuguese exploration, King John II forbade the open distribution of any map or navigational chart pertaining to New World discoveries under pain of death. Locked in a global land-grab race with neighbor Spain, cartographic intelligence was critical to expanding political power and exploiting the riches of the spice trade. While the link between this knowledge and economic advantage persists, in the last 500 years we have at least evolved to where transgressions aren’t enforced by the sword but rather the small-print legalese of the modern day end-user license agreement.

The small print was very much on my mind last week as I read “Empowering Citizen Cartographers”, a piece penned by World Bank official Caroline Antsey that appeared in the New York Times.  It begins as a paean to the wonders of crowd sourcing, especially in response to disasters such as the Haiti earthquake where Open Street Map shone as the de facto source of authoritative cartography. But then a new agreement between Google and the World Bank is described, whereby the latter actively promote and disseminate cartographic information from Google’s Map Maker platform. While Ms. Antsey indeed intended to praise Open Street Map, she seems singularly unaware that the actions of her organization may well bury Open Street Map in the developing world.

Because the license is clear: all of the data, all the fruits of the labor of those citizen cartographers, is the property of Google.  To be viewed through Google mapping interfaces with source data available under conditions specified by Google alone.  By contrast, Open Street Map data–yes, the raw data itself–is easily available to any and all, for purposes both non-profit and commercial.

Sure, nothing here explicitly prevents Open Street Map from continuing its work, but let’s get real: the deep pockets of Google paired with the imprimatur of the World Bank that effectively steers its partner governments, universities, and NGOs towards using the Map Maker platform may very well overwhelm Open Street Map’s more grass-roots efforts.  Google has shown an eager willingness to appropriate the tactics and rhetoric of community mapping, and of late, admitting to a bit of dirty pool in Africa against local startup Mocality.

(Google courageously pointed the finger not at its own employees but rather outside contractors it had hired.  Interestingly, if we were talking a violation of its own Map Maker terms, the old blame-the-contractor shtick wouldn’t play as this choice bit of Google language makes clear:  “If you are an entity, you acknowledge and agree that you are jointly and severally liable for the actions of your employees, contractors, agents, and other representatives. ” What’s good for the gander isn’t good for the goose, apparently.)

What’s in it for Google? Nothing more than a huge competitive advantage in the exploding smartphone market (and the concomitant local advertising revenue) in the developing world.  Imagine the commercial benefit of having exclusive access to the most detailed local cartography, collected for a pittance on the backs of “citizen cartographers”?  Even Tom Sawyer would blush.  It’s neocolonialism-meets-neogeography, only this time the shiny trinkets being dangled are laptops and Android phones.

If the World Bank was so impressed with the role of Open Street Map in Haiti, why throw its considerable weight behind the profit-seeking Google?  Who knows?  There have been collaborations in the past, and there appears to be a certain degree of chumminess in those circles. For those assuming Google is the only entity with the technical expertise to pull off the management of the crowd sourcing effort at this scale: please, stop.  Not only does Open Street Map have a platform and a track record, it also has the cooperative support of not-small-entities Mapquest and Microsoft.  So let’s put away the image of Google nobly shouldering a digital white man’s burden in bringing the developing world into the technically enlightened 21st century.

Make no mistake, Google has been the primary accelerant in the web mapping explosion of the last six years and they have spread the fruits of their innovation far and wide.  But the grating self-regard, borne of ideals that are never acknowledged to be driven by a motive so base as profit, has very much reached its sell-by date. It’s a 30,000 employee company hurtling towards middle-age whose growth has lately disappointed Wall Street: the potential profits in the fast-growing developing world figure largely in its future prospects.

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In 1494, Portugal and Spain signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, whereby under the auspices of the Pope Alexander VI, the New World was split between the two Catholic powers ad majorem Dei gloriam. One fears that the institutional favor the World Bank is granting to Map Maker will very much work to the greater glory of Google in the developing world, but at the expense of the full, free, and open access to the valuable information created by its own citizen cartographers.

—Brian Timoney

With the extra reflection that comes with any new year, I’ve been pondering a peculiarity of the presumably exciting geospatial industry: no one likes their business model.  Forget the giddy enthusiasm of 4-5 years ago, with the promised federal cutbacks at DoD/Homeland Security, along with the in-progress shrinking of state and local budgets, many shops are wondering how to keep treading water, let alone surf the wave of the next, ‘new’ thing.  How to explain this dissonance between a “cool” technology becoming more mainstream and the disquiet of not knowing how to profit from it?

Even though the Internet specializes in amplifying Moral Outrage, I’ve been taken aback by the public relations backlash against Google for having the temerity to charge its heaviest users of Maps. Well, more like reassured, since if Google (and Bing) has trouble explaining its pricing structure, then those of us who sell web-based services are allowed to cut ourselves some slack:

Reason #1:  No One Knows What Stuff Is Supposed to Cost on the Web

It’s been interesting to observe how the dominant vendor ESRI is playing their cloud-based offering. Since no one knows what things are supposed to cost on the web, using shrink-wrapped software analogs with which customers are already familiar helps…a lot. If you’re paying ‘x’ for an ArcServer license, then being able to do replicate the same end-user experiences using their online service for 60-70% of ‘x’ seems like a good deal.  A pronounced advantage to be sure, but competing on pure web experience is a punishing game, and so it’s even more important to lock in customers by any means necessary (including prodigious amounts of marketing).

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There’s this upscale-ish farm-to-table place in my neighborhood where the wait-staff has been trained to regale first-time visitors with their ‘story’.  I’m hungry, I’m ready to drop coin, and your story is delaying my eating experience.  My enthusiasm has been converted to the singular wish that the wait-person just shut up right now.  I think we in technology are too often like that wait-staff, excited to overwhelm our customers with technical minutiae that fails to address their fundamental needs…

Reason #2: We Like Technology and Read Obscure Blogs; Our Customers Like Beaches, Kids’ Soccer Games, & Napping (and Don’t Read Obscure Blogs)

As an enthusiastic user/promoter of open source software, effusively digging into minutiae and wondering about business models is second nature.  Indeed, I recently received an email asking for advice on “open source business models” and my immediate thought was…I wish I had one. Luckily, someone much brighter than myself, Paul Ramsey, gave a great talk on this very topic at FOSS4G last year.  While Paul does a great job unpacking the complicated relationship between price and value, and how those signals can sometimes get very crossed, let me add a more general observation…

Reason #3: We Get Excited by Free, Cutting-Edge Technology; the Words “Free” and “Cutting-Edge” Make Middle Managers Very, Very Nervous

A couple of weeks back 60 Minutes profiled Alex Honnold, a guy who “free-climbs” cliff faces without any kind of safety equipment.  Brushing aside questions of safety and living with no margin for error, one was left aghast watching him calmly negotiate one life-threatening obstacle after another. Where he enthusiastically talked of future challenges, the viewer is unable to shake that this young man will meet a grisly, premature end.

Unfamiliar technology with unfamiliar licensing terms take many managers out of their comfort zone, without a safety net. Paradoxically, in a tough economy when their own positions are more tenuous, the appetite for anything resembling risk is minimal indeed.  I know, the availability of source code is the ultimate safety net. Have you seen the average manager’s pupils dilate in fear and confusion the first time you show them GitHub?

But let’s not make the managerial class the target of our animus, but rather evaluate honestly whether we’re opting to spend too much time in the World-As-We-Wish-It-To-Be instead of the World-As-It-Is.  Our clients and potential clients managed to stay in business before we showed up on their door step, so let’s temper the perma-sugar high of techno optimisim with a measure of old-fashioned humility.

In next week’s post I’ll discuss my best guess as to the key components of the still-elusive 21st Century Geospatial Business Model.

—Brian Timoney