The Guide to What Was Important at FOSS4G for People Who Didn’t Go to FOSS4G 2011

September 26, 2011 17 Comments

So FOSS4G has come and gone, in fact it came and went over a week ago. My day job kept me from posting about what happened last week, but the weekend always gives you time to write [ref]Especially while watching Arizona State demolish Southern Cal[/ref]. The near 1000 of us who attended saw all the great new initiatives around the open source geospatial community, but you probably didn’t. So here is what I see as where you should be looking in the next year before FOSS4G happens again.

  • Mapnik is King — It seems every session had at least some Mapnik component to it. Mapnik is becoming the cartography engine of GIS. I saw cartography during FOSS4G 2011 that just blew my socks off. Innovation in this space is moving so fast and Mapnik is the choice for anyone who is making beautiful, useful maps.
  • PostGIS — PostGIS 2.0 will come out early next year and you will have zero excuse to use any other spatial database. Much like Mapnik, most sessions had some sort of PostGIS component to them. If you don’t want to be left behind, get the book and start changing how you manage your location data.
  • Designers — One thing that has always been a knock against “traditional GIS” is that it is designed by scientists for scientists. Totally unusable for ordinary users. What I noticed at FOSS4G 2011 was how many companies are employing designers to make sure their apps and maps are usable for everyone. Vizzuality and Development Seed[ref]Tell me that Dev Seed’s homepage isn’t awesome, I dare you.[/ref] have jump to the lead of pushing design in front of classic geospatial front ends. Vizzuality’s CartoSet is giving users tools that they can easily design beautiful mapping applications with little or no coding. Development Seed’s MapBox suite makes it easy to leverage the powerful Mapnik engine to produce tile caches that work out of the box without any need of expensive servers software. Awesome stuff.
  • QGIS — At least in North America, QGIS is the desktop application of choice. I don’t recall seeing any gvSIG or uDIG[ref]Is uDig dead?[/ref] presentations, but QGIS was used by almost everyone. Over the last year it has morphed into a desktop GIS tool that is now my primary choice when working with GIS data. Combining QGIS with Mapnik gives me the ability to make beautiful cartography I cannot create anywhere else. It is completely liberating!
  • JavaScript not Flex/Silverlight — Yea, it isn’t much of a surprise, open source users aren’t big Flex or Silverlight users, but JavaScript HTML5 web apps are everywhere and doing everything Flex/Silverlight can do, but work everywhere[ref]When I refer to everywhere, I choose to ignore IE 6, 7, 8. If you’re stuck on those, find a new job[/ref]. At this point it is safe to call every Flex/Silverlight location app as legacy as nobody in their right mind would be coding with those tools in 2012.

FOSS4G 2011 was probably the best Geospatial/Location Conference I’ve been to. Paul Ramsey put it best when he said:

I told some folks at FOSS4G 2011 that I thought this year’s event was the “best FOSS4G ever” (HT, Juan Antonio Samaranch) but that wasn’t just tongue in cheek. 2011 was the biggest ever, but only a few attendees more than Barcelona in 2010. Yet somehow I felt more energized, more connected, like I had more conversations, than in 2010.

That was pretty much exactly how I felt. I was connect to the attendees, I was energized by the talks and left feeling like at least a portion of the geospatial community has a future in front of it. What is best about this community it is free to join. Just bring your experiences and get started.

The Tragic Prelude

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Where I Lose My Mind Thinking About GeoDesign

January 20, 2011 12 Comments

There is no such thing as a GeoDesigner

To understand what GeoDesign is you have to drop any ideas of it being a profession. Yes that means you don’t have to worry about little Timmy growing up to be a GeoDesigner. I sat for almost a day listening to people argue about an ontology for us to argue about a definition about GeoDesign. Yea, you read that right, ontology has been added to the list of drinking words at any GeoDesign summit.

After that first day I was a little shaken by what I saw but a night’s sleep clears the mind. People arguing about ontologies are only concerned about either writing about GeoDesign or teaching it. The 99.999% of the rest of us can move on and not worry about such minutia as the term “dashboard”[ref]I think the point was calling a website information panel a “dashboard” is offensive to dashboards[/ref] being offensive.

That all said, we all agreed that there is nothing called a GeoDesigner and we all took a blood oath to never let such a job be created.

Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here. This is the GeoDesign Room!

What’s The Point Then?

OK, so “we” reject the idea of creating an ontology[ref]Ontologies are irrelevant in the age of a Google search. Chew on that thought for a while.[/ref] and the idea that we can all go back to school and get our MA in GeoDesign. Why did I bother going to the GeoDesign summit anyway? Clearly I’ve got better things to do the first week of the year than spend it in Redlands, right?

Clearly no. I’ve said again and again that the Geography needs to be a deeper part of all planning. Sure we’ve all been “doing GeoDesign” since man could first pick up a stick and drew up where the dinosaurs lived so they wouldn’t be eaten[ref]At least that is what The Flintstones taught me about history.[/ref]. Place is critical to any planning and thus whether you are a GeoDesign believer or GeoDesign agnostic, you have to give me the point, “place matters”.  Thus, the concepts of GeoDesign matter even if calling it that makes your skin crawl.

Let Us Stop Making Things Complicated

What concerns me about GeoDesign though is that many of the people defining what it is or isn’t seem to live by the theory, complex problems require complex solutions. I don’t know about any of you, but my life and job are complex enough without “design strategies” defined on high. I want simple solutions to my problems because those are the ones that are implemented. Complex ones get stuffed in binders and put on a bookshelf[ref]Yup, I’m pissed my hard work over the years with planners has spent most of it’s time on the shelf.[/ref]. Time to make that stop!

A Way Forward?

Part of why I didn’t rush out and write about what I saw and heard at the 2011 GeoDesign Summit is that I’m not sure the details of what happened matter. GeoDesign 2011 is in the past and it probably was a good outcome as a second summit. There was some interesting talks, but nothing that I really wanted to jump up and say “Yes!”. What was sorely needed was someone showing how they are going to use “geo” and “design” together in the future. I think we’ve grown beyond proving we all have been doing GeoDesign for years and show how we are going to design[ref]Big “D” or little “d” design; I’m pretty sure I’m making a joke there but I guess you had to be there.[/ref] in the coming months, years, decades. There is all this big talk about GeoDesign being able to save humanity from ourselves but we continue to show work we did years ago. Aren’t we better than that?

If we commit to using Geo with Design, think about where we’ll be in 2001!

[/references]

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Thoughts on the GeoDesign Summit

January 9, 2010 26 Comments

I’m sure many of you have been following #geodesign on Twitter, but I thought I’d add some of my deeper thoughts.  First off, yes everyone in attendance realizes that we’ve all been doing this since the beginning of time.  GeoDesign wasn’t invented by anyone in particular, that was clear to everyone.

So I guess the next question what is GeoDesign and why do we need to even define it, especially if we’ve been doing this for years anyway?  Since we’ve all be already been doing this for years shouldn’t this be easy to define since we already have an understanding of it?  A Wikipedia entry has been started and I’d encourage everyone to take a look at it and refine it based upon your experiences.

I think a couple things helped bring so many people together from so many different disciplines.  With Architects, Planners, Engineers, Technologists, Researchers, Professors, Graduate Students and “other”; there was academia, government and private industry.  The one person in our industry that has the pull to get this done is of course Jack Dangermond.  He was also gracious enough to allow the organizers to use the new ESRI Q Building which was perfectly set up for a conference of this size.

Adena Schutzberg and Matt Ball both did a great job diving deep into the conference and it would be a good idea to read up on what was discussed and what needs to be done to move forward.  What I’m going to talk about is what I think came out of the Summit and what should be the next steps.

First off, there was a little push-back that was acknowledged at the Summit which seemed to revolve around the fact that some small group of people seemed to think they could take ownership of something everyone has been doing for years, GeoDesign.  I was also a little on edge about what might have come out from this Summit, but in the end it was unfounded. The group of folks from Michael Goodchild to Carl Steinitz all where very pragmatic about GeoDesign, how we involve more in the process of design (how crowdsourcing can be involved), to even deeper issues such as how we must fundamentally change how we as humans impact our environment.

Many showed examples of GeoDesign projects that they are currently work on to ones that were completed decades ago.  Also despite the Summit occurring on ESRI’s campus, there were many examples showed that included non-ESRI technology such as GRASS, Google Earth and SketchUp.  Jack also stood up on stage and hoped next year the organizers could include other software platforms and technologies that weren’t on stage this year.

So this brings up what to do next.  Where do we go from here.  Jack asked everyone in attendance if they thought we should move forward with the GeoDesign concept and everyone agreed we should.  The details on how were to do so was what we discussed Friday morning.  There will be a GeoDesign Summit next year.  Tom Fisher the Dean for the College of Design at University of Minnesota offered to host it there.  Given the warm weather though many though Redlands would be a great location to hold it again (Mid 70s in January is hard to beat).  Jack said that if the committee wanted to hold it at ESRI again he would offer up the facilities again.  Jack also said he wanted to unbrand the summit from ESRI and have it stand alone.  To do this the Summit will be moving off of the ESRI servers on to its own and engage other potential stakeholders.

Since there was so much content created and organized there was a discussion on how to best disseminate the data out to everyone.  This was probably the most contensious discussion.  On one had you have those who wanted to write books (grey hairs) and on the other there were those who wanted to set up a wiki and get more community involvement.  In the end it appears we will have both, a GeoDesign book you can get signed by your favorite GeoDesigner and a wiki the community can showcase their ideas and collaborate.

One problem is how to get this information out to the community at large.  Organizations such as the APA have the tools in place (and not ESRI branded) to facilitate getting the word out to their members.  Since there were many researchers present, there was also questions about how we can get funding in place from NSF or possibly even the World Bank since better planning and design is critical to helping reverse the destruction of the planet.

So bottom line?  I admit I’m not one with too much patience for “University think” and there was plenty at the first GeoDesign Summit.  But at the same time there was so much practicality shown that it isn’t hard to want to get Design and GIS more interconnected.  One group that I think was underrepresented at the Summit was Technologists (I can’t say Architects or Designers because in this crowd that means something else).  The gap between “GeoDesigners” and the public needs to be bridged with our work and our expertise.  Making sure that this is represented in this GeoDesign initiative is important and we are those who need to make sure this is grounded in reality and not locked up in University research.

So lets see what happens.  Will there be continued push back to “GeoDesign” from the geospatial community or will people want to be involved on the ground floor defining and encouraging GeoDesign?  I think we all realize powerful things happen when there is a marriage of design and GIS.

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Stopping Over-engineered GIS Applications

September 30, 2008 22 Comments

I was thinking the past week about a project that we will start working on soon. Simply put, it is updating a MapObjects IMS application we deployed almost 10 years ago, that is still working. When I saw that it was not only still running, but it was still a critical part of their business workflow, it started me thinking about why such an application was so successful. It obviously wasn’t the technology. Sure the back end runs on Oracle, but even the most ardent MOIMS supporter can’t claim that the Visual Basic application was cutting edge even back then. So that must mean there was something else going on that kept it running when most MOIMS sites are long gone.

Wont someone please think of the users?

Won't someone please think of the users?

History of GIS applications tells us one story that repeats itself again and again.  There is a horrible habit of pushing over-engineered applications that are not used by the target audience because no one has time to figure out complicated tools.  GIS vendors have not discouraged such habits and in some cases encourage them.  The GIS world is really good at writing GIS applications for GIS professionals.  I think this used to work before GIS and mapping became important in our everyday lives, but now that everyone everywhere is looking at deploying spatial applications focus needs to be put on what the end users are going to be doing with the application.

So back to that old MapObjects application, it did a really good job of doing what it was supposed to do.  Display information in a context that the users were comfortable working (the interface was familiar to them) with and meet their requirements (which were obviously well developed), fit within their websites, scaled well (even Visual Basic does that apparently) and wasn’t an obstacle to their workflows.  With MOIMS depreciated and the need to connect to more modern ESRI servers and Oracle databases the application needs to be updated, but not because it restricts their business practices and workflows.

Foisting this application on users of a bus system was poorly thought out, but the Google Transit version released a few weeks ago hits the target users right on.  The heavy GIS website might meet needs of users in the organizations internally, but externally it really highlights missed opportunities and wasted resources.  I’m personally really excited to see if we can replicate the success of the earlier MOIMS application with JavaScript APIs, KML downloads and other new technology and still keep is simple.  The key is listen to what the client really wants and be agile enough to deliver simple, focused, and fast products.

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