Hi All, I'll put on the capitalistic pig or Schumpetarian hat and say that the reason you don't see more innovation coming from within the traditional GIS community is the lack of incentive. Without incentive you'll see little innovation or even creative destruction. The GIS industry is dominated by large enterprises who seldom acquire companies and don't have a huge amount of investment capital behind them.
Therefore if you are going to innovate and try to get enough momentum to sustain your innovation you are going to have to be able to create a sustainable revenue generating company. That does not give you a lot of room for taking big risks that result in big innovations. The entrance of players like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have altered the landscape significantly because they bring large amounts of capital to the game, which they are willing to spend, which provides incentive to the market place. This means a willingness to invest in R&D and acquire companies to gain a competitive advantage. This has pushed traditional GIS firms to innovate more (I've seen more innovation out of ESRI in the last three years than I saw in the previous 10), but still at a relatively slow pace. That all said what the FOSS community has achieved in the geo-space is really very impressive considering the lack of incentives at least of the financial variety. I'd argue that financial incentives still play a role in FOSS. If you look at other thriving FOSS communities there is considerable corporate sponsorship and several successful commercial spin offs. The only spin off we can point to is CloudMade (please add others if I have missed any). It is really a shame that we do not see more sponsorship for FOSS4G from the ESRI, MapInfo, Integraph, Microsoft, and Yahoo's of the worlds (Google and Autodesk did sponsor). I also think it is damaging that we generally see more direct competition with FOSS from the large enterprises than co-opting or acquiring technologies. Again this decreases incentive which decreases the willingness to take risks and innovate. This makes it very tough for geo start ups to get VC funding because the big guys are spending more time squashing than acquiring. It is an ecosystem and if you want to see innovation from the ecosystem you have to feed it with incentives. Otherwise it withers becomes corporate and lacks the dynamic economic growth created by innovation. My 2 cents loosely based on stuff I read a long time ago about innovation and economic growth ;-) best, sean FortiusOne Inc, 2200 Wilson Blvd. suite 307 Arlington, VA 22201 cell - 202-321-3914 ----- Original Message ----- From: "R E Sieber" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, October 9, 2008 2:31:08 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern Subject: Re: [Geowanking] criticism of the foss4g entrance fee for speakers Hi Anselm, I have to take issue here. We in the GIS community have lots of blinders. And I suppose you could accuse of putting considerable inertia on geospatial innovations. But we're not responsible for high fees. Plus there's lots of innovation coming from the GIS community but it's not necessarily only computational. I can't speak to the algorithms, although I know there's plenty of fine work being done in naive wayfinding and generalization for navigation devices. My field is in the participatory aspects of GIS/geoweb and we're doing a lot to understand the challenges people face in accessing technology and contributing their own user generated content. I hate the VGI label too. It focuses on information alone and not the "volunteered" applications, IDEs, etc. Those are the innovations you're talking about. Additionally it ignores the power underlying the ability to volunteer and the access to technology. We can have all the applications and Internet connectivity (and WiMax for those who don't have phone access) but that still won't get at issues of lack of electricity and cartographic literacy and suppression of geospatial information by the state and their complicit corporations. So it's in these non-computational aspects I think that we can make real advances and come to some meeting of the minds between the GIS community and the neogeo code sprinters. Renee Anselm Hook wrote: > Now that foss4g is over - I did have one comment about it. > > As far as I was able to understand foss4g wanted to charge $600 > dollars for speakers to present. Maybe I misunderstood this? It just > seems so bizarre and so alien and such a speed-bump that it really > didn't make any sense to me. It was like a socialist take on open > source - where everybody has to carry equal weight. This is why I > dropped my participation with prejudice - apologies to the folks who > wanted to see my talk. > > There is good work from the GIS open source enthusiasts - PostGIS > extensions, MapServer, OpenLayers - effectively from people who are > now financed by GIS companies and are now GIS insiders. Part of what > makes this innovation great is that it is open source at all - in a > world where ESRI dominates. > > But there's a problem in the open source GIS community. It is being > constantly innovated into by outsiders. It doesn't seem to innovate > outwards. And this means that often new work doesn't leverage old > expertise. I constantly watch new ideas struggle to find ways to > manage geometry and solve problems that have already been solved. > > Look at the list of recent innovations. Why didn't OSM come from > inside the GIS community? Why didn't tiling and tile caches come from > within the GIS community? Why do mapping solutions deal with temporal > data so badly? Why is transient and volatile ephemeral data so > difficult to manage with classical GIS solutions? Why do they deal > with client side persistence and real time streaming so badly? Why do > strangled phrases like "volunteered geographic information" get any > airtime? Why does the average video game toss around 100k polygons > phong shaded lit polygons at 60 fps while most GIS clients struggle to > show even 10k lines at 1 fps? > > Projects like tonchidot, work in ambient computing and augmented > reality coming out of university research labs, or google, and random > hacker teams - and seem to in part be re-inventing the wheel. They > have their own formats, they seem to emerge full cloth with no > history, they act as if nothing else exists. Why aren't more crazy > new ideas coming from (or supported in part by) established players > such as say MetaCarta or ESRI or um, even (although perhaps not > strictly fair because we've seen a fair degree of innovation here) > from Poly9 or Urban Mapping? > > Maybe I'm wrong here - it's hard to really see the whole landscape - > does the EarthMine team come from a GIS background for example? Maybe > NASA WorldWind is also a good example of something amazing that comes > from the 'inside'. > > Basically I'm trying to understand if people holding new ideas could > afford to fly to somewhere far away like South Africa, pay an entrance > fee, and help spark innovation and dialogue and get feedback with > people who are truly expert and could make their vision fly.... and if > not then how to suggest fixing it. > > In any case my recommendations for foss4g are, > > 1) Sponsorship to reduce costs overall. > > 2) Speakers should be discounted to foster new participation. > > - me > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > Geowanking mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
