WhereCamp5280 Presentation
August 14, 2009 9 Comments
Here is my slide deck from my plenary talk at WhereCamp5280. You can follow along as you watch the video of my talk on GeoGeek TV.
Chief Evangelist for WeoGeo.com
Geospatial Technology, Web Mapping and Spatial Services
August 14, 2009 9 Comments
Here is my slide deck from my plenary talk at WhereCamp5280. You can follow along as you watch the video of my talk on GeoGeek TV.
Chief Evangelist for WeoGeo.com
Farkin’ A. James, That. Is. The. Stuff.
Look at all the MILLIONS of our tax dollars that have been poured into worthless geoportals (Geodata.gov AKA the geospatial Rub’ al Khali) – they’re all cobwebs.
But you know what? I gotta tell you, I’m not sure ANYONE really has an interest to share unless the whole thing is just thrown wide open.
Folks, pay for it and use it for a year. Then post it (or have someone host it) for another 12 months. If all you get are five human requests and dozens of spiders crawling you once a month, then just give it away. That’s right, throw it into the wind. Someone might pick it up and make something better of it – and more power to them. And don’t get huffy if they do…because if you hadn’t given it away, it never would have seen the light of day.
From a business angle, since the data you’re working on now (you ARE updating your content, aren’t you?) is 24 months newer than the ‘old’ data you’re now ‘giving’ away, there should be no issue in justifying the release to the codgers on your county council that approved the GIS in the first place.
James, nice work. Stay hydrated…that altitude’s a killer, man.
Is there a lot of PowerPoint and product placement at the camp? I’m partly appalled, partly bummed to be missing out.
It is a mix. Actually ESRI’s talk was sans slide deck. Lots of good ninja spatial stuff being shown though.
Sean, you seem to be a man who is easily appalled
. I’m not quite sure what you’re appalled about – that James was allowed to use PowerPoint to give an interesting presentation which all the attendees seemed to enjoy? We let people use whatever approach they wanted to use to communicate – some did presentations, some demos and some just led a discussion. Or you’re concerned that there was some nefarious “product placement” scheme underlying the event? I really don’t understand that either (or why you think that). We did have a few presentations from vendors of software and services in the mix, based on interest from attendees – I don’t think any of them were really “commercial” and all of them seemed to be interesting and well received. Fortunately we’ve had nothing but positive feedback from people who actually attended the event. We plan to hold another one next year and I hope you’ll be around to participate in that one and not find it too appalling 
.
I think Mr. Gillies is appalled because he saw a slide deck that showed something about WeoGeo instead of something free and open and unconnected to a proprietary way of thinking.
You know, something like (ahem) Google.
The Google’s pitches make me equally itchy. Are pitches toxic or am I just hypersensitive? I’m glad to read that slides were the exception, not the rule.
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James…from the powerpoint, all it seems your doing is listing several bad websites and then showing us how you can select an AOI, input some criteria and then list the results of the search. Am i missing something? You raise a problem, but are not providing any solutions.
@imagoterra: yes part of the problem is that I was limited by my time to present so you got a cut down presentation. Another problem is that there aren’t too many websites out there doing things correctly, every time I find one and say this is a great example of doing it right, it fails me.
Clearly what we need to a mindset change and my hope in my talk was breaking out of old thinking such as exposing metadata to users, we can get where we need to be.