MapBrief™

It was a post of narrow import: QGIS now has more native SQL Server 2008 support. While I was happy to note the participation and support of folks I both know and like, I was nonetheless slightly irritated by a nagging thought.

“Why didn’t Microsoft do this itself already?”

A few years back I remember talking with others in the industry who had no direct interest in Microsoft one way or another, but were nonetheless excited when spatial capabilities were added to SQL Server 2008.  The idea was it would ignite fresh interest in geo analysis and visualization among those who already had SQL Server but were outside the traditional GIS constituencies–they would gladly open their wallets for additional mapping magic.  All boats would rise and we would happily buy beers for comrades from Redmond who finally persuaded the mainstream that geo-in-the-enterprise doesn’t mean “Enterprise GIS.”

Hasn’t quite worked out that way, has it?

So if I were a vendor of databases with spatial capabilities and I knew I wasn’t  going to bother with the desktop GIS market myself, wouldn’t it be savvy to look for cost-effective opportunities to reach new users with my product–especially if I already have a free express edition with that sole purpose?  I know, there are high-level vendor relationships to maintain.  But really, run the funding through a re-seller or better still a non-profit (tax deduction!) and, if confronted by a business partner, express passable wonderment that the open source community has devoted resources to interoperating with your proprietary technology.

Let’s continue the thought experiment. Imagine a slick, usable cartography tool for making  web maps that happens to be open source.  As it stands, it (predictably) only offers database connections to PostGIS.  But why not Oracle or SQL Server connectivity? If Microsoft or Oracle reached behind their sofa cushions, I’m sure they’d find enough loose change to convince DevelopmentSeed or a freelance developer to make it happen.  You might piss off partners, you might piss off internal dev teams, but if the ROI of your geospatial investments is lagging who can blame you for leveraging the open source community as, what the GeoInt folks would refer to, a force multiplier.

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Next week geospatial open source will be on center stage at the FOSS4G-NA conference in Washington DC.  While following quickly on the heels of the international FOSS4G conference in Denver last Fall (due to a unique set of logistical circumstances), the leading organizational role of OpenGeo (they offer Enterprise-level service and support for a pure geospatial open source stack) has drawn some criticism snark. To which I say: kudos to OpenGeo for taking the initiative.  Being on the Denver organizing committee I can assert that at a certain scale relying on pure volunteerism isn’t viable.  To pull together an event on short notice in such a key market will no doubt be a big win for the broader community.

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Chatting with Autodesk’s Geoff Zeiss at FOSS4G in Denver, he opined that the next step for geospatial open source was its embedding in vertical-specific applications.  Paraphrasing Geoff, we’re beyond the defensive-sounding “it’s just as good as <insert closed-source vendor equivalent here>”. The major software packages are proven–let’s solve specific domain problems and create much larger value for end-users than merely the licensing terms of the components underneath the hood.  I recalled this conversation in the context of this week’s release of PostGIS 2.0: raster and vector stored in the same database and available for cross-dataset analysis via SQL commands, 3-D distance measure, topology, and 3D and 4D indexing.  In Oil & Gas, one of the premier desktop analysis packages in the industry runs on top of the Borland Database Engine: legacy would be the most polite descriptor. The potential for these new capabilities to overhaul non-intuitive workflows is enormous and I hope someone makes a ton of money doing so, because right now there are plenty of incumbents complacently collecting maintenance fees for only marginally improving 10-15 year-old codebases.

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The innovative maturation of open source geospatial software has been powered by the efforts of developers around the world often working for below-market rates.  It may strike one as counterintuitive, but  having this core community ripped off by the suit-and-$100-haircut crowd is probably more difficult given both a development process made more transparent through tools such as GitHub as well as the soft policing powers of social media.  The way I see it, the costs of potential free riders is microscopic compared to the opportunity costs of our most powerful and innovative tools not being used in the service of solving society’s biggest, gnarliest, and yes, most expensive problems.

—Brian Timoney

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