Hmmm, all sorts of frustration being ventilated in yesterday's batch of messages.
A comment on the recurrent "the mainstream GIS guys don't get it" thread: Some of these big companies *do* seem to be trying to approach the neogeography world, so support some of its more stable formats/protocols, etc. however please do remember that these companies need to try to take care of large ministry-level clients. Repeatedly asking them to discard last month's cool app and try this new even cooler app....does not work in that large-scale, stable (and boring) environment. On the VGI term that most everyone here seems to hate (not-invented-here?): (Professor) Goodchild tried to coin a term sufficiently serious and credible for the academic world (where geowanking becomes something like "popular prototyping of innovative geographic applications"!), while conveying the basic notions behind neogeography and other similar "memes". He did not intend for the term to overly focus on the data, just as I suppose "neogeography" was not intended to overly focus on things that (only) geographers do. Applying to both comments: we don't all need to become one homogeneous mass and think and talk alike... ¡viva la diversidad! ______________________________________________ Michael Gould Dept. Information Systems (LSI) Universitat Jaume I, 12071 Castellón, Spain. email: gould (at) lsi.uji.es www.geoinfo.uji.es -----Mensaje original----- De: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] En nombre de [EMAIL PROTECTED] Enviado el: viernes, 10 de octubre de 2008 5:27 Para: [email protected] Asunto: Geowanking Digest, Vol 59, Issue 8 Send Geowanking mailing list submissions to [email protected] To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can reach the person managing the list at [EMAIL PROTECTED] When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Geowanking digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Re: criticism of the foss4g entrance fee for speakers (Frank Warmerdam) 2. Re: criticism of the foss4g entrance fee for speakers ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) 3. Re: criticism of the foss4g entrance fee for speakers (Brandon Martin-Anderson) 4. Re: criticism of the foss4g entrance fee for speakers (Anselm Hook) 5. Re: criticism of the foss4g entrance fee for speakers (Frank Warmerdam) 6. Re: criticism of the foss4g entrance fee for speakers (Tim Bowden) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:03:50 -0400 From: Frank Warmerdam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [Geowanking] criticism of the foss4g entrance fee for speakers To: [email protected] Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Brandon Martin-Anderson wrote: > How could we overcome this? A new user's first introduction to a > system of abstraction needs to be excruciatingly gentle and > non-abstract. Right: http://www.feedparser.org/. Wrong: > http://www.gdal.org/gdal_tutorial.html. Brandon, It's nice to be noticed, but not this way! Gee, and I was pretty proud of that tutorial as approachable. In fact, I found the feedparser thing somewhat off putting. I would be interested in suggestions on a better structure for the GDAL tutorial though I don't know if I would act on them. PS. Anselm - I kind of wish you had let the organizers know you weren't planning to give your presentation. As session chair it was embarassing for me to announce that you had not bothered to show up for the presentation you signed up to give. But clearly the lesson is that the conference folks need to cross check and identify this problem themselves since it was alarmingly common in capetown. Best regards, -- ---------------------------------------+------------------------------------ -- I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, [EMAIL PROTECTED] light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam and watch the world go round - Rush | Geospatial Programmer for Rent ------------------------------ Message: 2 Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2008 15:09:01 -0400 (EDT) From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Geowanking] criticism of the foss4g entrance fee for speakers To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 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 ------------------------------ Message: 3 Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2008 12:20:32 -0700 From: "Brandon Martin-Anderson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [Geowanking] criticism of the foss4g entrance fee for speakers To: [email protected] Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Hey Frank, I'm terribly sorry. I just especially like the welcome page for the feed parser. As I was grabbing the link for *some other library's tutorial* I thought, "hey you know this one isn't that bad." Maybe I should have picked on myself and posted this: http://graphserver.sourceforge.net/. -B On Thu, Oct 9, 2008 at 12:03 PM, Frank Warmerdam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Brandon Martin-Anderson wrote: >> How could we overcome this? A new user's first introduction to a >> system of abstraction needs to be excruciatingly gentle and >> non-abstract. Right: http://www.feedparser.org/. Wrong: >> http://www.gdal.org/gdal_tutorial.html. > > Brandon, > > It's nice to be noticed, but not this way! Gee, and I was pretty > proud of that tutorial as approachable. In fact, I found the > feedparser thing somewhat off putting. > > I would be interested in suggestions on a better structure for the > GDAL tutorial though I don't know if I would act on them. > > PS. Anselm - I kind of wish you had let the organizers know you weren't > planning to give your presentation. As session chair it was embarassing > for me to announce that you had not bothered to show up for the > presentation you signed up to give. But clearly the lesson is that > the conference folks need to cross check and identify this problem > themselves since it was alarmingly common in capetown. > > Best regards, > -- > ---------------------------------------+------------------------------------ -- > I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, [EMAIL PROTECTED] > light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam > and watch the world go round - Rush | Geospatial Programmer for Rent > > _______________________________________________ > Geowanking mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking > ------------------------------ Message: 4 Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2008 15:42:46 -0700 From: Anselm Hook <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [Geowanking] criticism of the foss4g entrance fee for speakers To: Frank Warmerdam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed; delsp=yes I did tell them btw - apologies for the mixup :( Sent from my iPhone On Oct 9, 2008, at 12:03 PM, Frank Warmerdam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Brandon Martin-Anderson wrote: >> How could we overcome this? A new user's first introduction to a >> system of abstraction needs to be excruciatingly gentle and >> non-abstract. Right: http://www.feedparser.org/. Wrong: >> http://www.gdal.org/gdal_tutorial.html. > > Brandon, > > It's nice to be noticed, but not this way! Gee, and I was pretty > proud of that tutorial as approachable. In fact, I found the > feedparser thing somewhat off putting. > > I would be interested in suggestions on a better structure for the > GDAL tutorial though I don't know if I would act on them. > > PS. Anselm - I kind of wish you had let the organizers know you > weren't > planning to give your presentation. As session chair it was > embarassing > for me to announce that you had not bothered to show up for the > presentation you signed up to give. But clearly the lesson is that > the conference folks need to cross check and identify this problem > themselves since it was alarmingly common in capetown. > > Best regards, > -- > --------------------------------------- > +-------------------------------------- > I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, [EMAIL PROTECTED] > light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam > and watch the world go round - Rush | Geospatial Programmer for > Rent > ------------------------------ Message: 5 Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:27:37 -0400 From: Frank Warmerdam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [Geowanking] criticism of the foss4g entrance fee for speakers To: [email protected] Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > 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. Sean, I wouldn't argue with the above, though I hadn't really thought of it in these terms before. > 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). I can point to quite a number of integrator/consultant companies that are spun off or closely related to FOSS4G projects. Perhaps I'm missing your point about what counts as a spin-off? > 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). ESRI was an exhibitor (not sure about being a sponsor). But honestly, I'm not sure why you feel it is a shame that few of the above companies were sponsors. While I appreciate the money from any sponsor, I'm not sure why the above are of special value. In many ways I prefer sponsorships from more FOSS oriented organizations (such as mid sized integrators, etc), and end user organizations (governments, etc) to sponsorships from software vendors primarily selling proprietary solutions. > 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 ;-) I've seen lots of co-opting of open source technology (ie. GDAL) by major companies (Leica, ESRI, Autodesk, Google, MapInfo), and even a some snapping up of smaller companies (Microsoft swallowed two of my clients!). I am embarrassed to admit that thinking about VC funding, startups and the sort of ferment you seem to see as signs of health is somewhat foreign to me. I'm more pleased to see organically growing small and midsized organizations providing services, and contributing to the software pool in cooperative ways. I'd like to promise to think about this viewpoint more deeply, but the truth is that I'll almost certainly return to my head down, reactive-to-clients needs approach to life. Perhaps I should be on the geo-slugs list. Best regards, -- ---------------------------------------+------------------------------------ -- I set the clouds in motion - turn up | Frank Warmerdam, [EMAIL PROTECTED] light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam and watch the world go round - Rush | Geospatial Programmer for Rent ------------------------------ Message: 6 Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2008 11:26:32 +0800 From: Tim Bowden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [Geowanking] criticism of the foss4g entrance fee for speakers To: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [email protected] Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain On Thu, 2008-10-09 at 10:59 -0700, 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. > I've already let off steam over this on the osgeo conf dev list (so I'll be a little more polite here), but for me this is a heap of rubbish. FOSS4G is about the gathering of the open source geospatial tribes. It's about community. It's our chance to get together, swap stories, tell each other what we're up to and share ideas. If you need to be paid to do that, don't bother. If you don't have the passion to be a part of that community, that's fine. Just don't expect us to pay you (the speaker, by way of discounts) at the expense of other participants to come and tell us what you've been up to. A significant part of our community does what they do for the love of it. Yes, many (most?) of us make a living out of it, but open source doesn't discriminate between those who earn their money from it and those who only do it for the love of it. The neotards are just as important and welcome as the paleotards. As a gathering of the community, we'd like to try and reflect that in FOSS4G. That is why we have a deliberate policy of making the conference as accessible as possible to the entire community. It's not about everyone carrying equal weight. It's about everyone having as much chance as possible of contributing. That's why the conference travels to such "far away" places as Cape Town, South Africa and Sydney, Australia. Not just the likes of Victoria, Canada or Lausanne, Switzerland. > 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. And you see this as a problem? This is the nature of open source, geospatial or otherwise. I'd see this as one of the great strengths of open source. > It doesn't seem to innovate outwards. Sorry, but my experience is very different here. I've seen open source create solutions that just haven't been matched elsewhere. > 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. > Nature of open source. Multiple implementations happen all the time. Yes, it would be nice if we could be more "economical" sometimes, and maybe we could be much better at sharing our solutions (hey, why don't we lower the barriers to sharing our ideas some more?) but that's part and parcel of the nature of open source. You can't stop someone doing their own thing. > 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? > Within the GIS community? Don't you mean the /traditional/ gis community? Ok, so we have a new bunch of people playing in the gis sandpit. Isn't that great? Maybe we should break down the barriers to the gis sandpit a bit more and get more outsider input and ideas. For the life of me, I can't see that as a bad thing. No person or group has a monopoly on good ideas or insights to a problem. Given enough eyeballs, every problem is shallow. Lets get as many eyeballs from as many different directions as we can. If we try and confine our solutions to come from a predetermined mindset (traditional gis in this case) surely we are all the poorer for it. > 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. Beware of premature optimisation. In solving a new problem, get it solved before you try and optimise. Sometimes that means re-inventing the wheel, because often until you do solve the problem, you don't actually understand it properly. As inefficient as it sounds, I think it's often the path of least resistance and the most economical in the long run. Once you have found a solution, and understand the problem then you can optimise (or use the best solution, new or existing). > 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'. No matter how big you (company, community, industry) are, you're always smaller than the sum of everyone else. To me it makes sense that there will always be great ideas coming from "everyone else". That's what often gives the impetus for us to change. When you create barriers to participation (closed in ecosystems, closed formats, closed comms protocols etc) you reduce the stimulus from "outside" and hence reason to change. Maybe that's one reason why we've seen so little innovation from the traditional established gis players before open source gis got airtime? > > 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. Some of those new ideas will _come_from_ South Africa. To me that's as good a reason as any for OSgeo to seed participation in the open source gis community in places like that with FOSS4G. Entrance fee? We'd love to have none. Unfortunately events like that cost. As part of the FOSS4G 2009 organising team, I can assure you we're working hard to keep the cost as low as possible for *everyone*. We'd love to reduce the barriers to participation as much as possible. > > In any case my recommendations for foss4g are, > > 1) Sponsorship to reduce costs overall. Believe me, we're constantly chasing this. We'd love to hear from anyone who has sponsorship ideas, no matter how crazy. > > 2) Speakers should be discounted to foster new participation. > This year's delegate is just as likely to be next years speaker. Reducing costs for speakers means increasing costs for delegates. We'd like to make the spread of ideas as free as possible, which means reducing costs for both. Given our registration costs are so much lower than many traditional conferences, I think we're getting there, though we'd love to go much further. For me the key to spreading ideas is passion, not pay. > - me Regards, Tim Bowden -- Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you recognize a mistake when you make it again. ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking End of Geowanking Digest, Vol 59, Issue 8 ***************************************** _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
