I am not sure this is the correct forum for a start to this discussion, but I've been pondering this for a while and interested what others think. I work for local government in the U.S. and when people generally talk about GIS there is no doubt an automatic association with the ESRI ArcGIS platform. And beyond GIS itself, the dominance that ESRI has is even more pronounced given the fact that many cities have implemented other related systems (permitting, computer aided dispatch, etc) that are identified business partners with ESRI. Furthermore, the "GIS Local Government" track that ESRI developed has evolved to offer an "turnkey" approach for local government self-service to establish a robust geodatabase (Local Government Information Model), maps, apps, web services, etc. This extends a COTS approach for local governments to establish, develop, and maintain a fairly complete GIS. In my opinion, pure genius...because for a lot of small cities/governments with limited staff and budget, the turnkey approach is very appealing. For city bureaucrats thinking about implementing/extending GIS, what they might think as little $$$ and you get all of this? Awesome...here's my money.
HOWEVER, this approach has its drawbacks. Long-term license/use costs, vendor lock-in, continuous waiting for someone at the company to fix something....well, the list goes on (just read any blog post supporting open source/FOSS). So, with the evolution of QGIS as a prevailing replacement/alternative for the other product, is anyone thinking about building more of a turnkey approach (database, maps, apps, web services, etc) geared to local governments? I like the direction of the OpenGeo platform (and others) trying to provide the whole software stack, but still if a small local government wants to have a full fledged interactive GIS, it might seem like a lot of work to develop and maintain. I am interested in other thoughts...perhaps this belongs on a blog post somewhere more independent, but perhaps this can be a place to begin. Steve G. -- View this message in context: http://osgeo-org.1560.x6.nabble.com/Local-Government-for-QGIS-tp5210489.html Sent from the Quantum GIS - User mailing list archive at Nabble.com. _______________________________________________ Qgis-user mailing list Qgis-user@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user