Geospatial Collaboration: Working together spatially at Internet Scale Hi everyone. I was asked to kick off the conference today with some thoughts on the history, status and future of geospatial collaboration. Our hosts here have put together a really great program about many facets of geospatial collaboration. That’s potentially a huge topic… –Chris Holmes 1

Internet Scale? But I decided I'm going to limit my talk today to geospatial collaboration that leverages the power of the internet. There has certainly been geospatial collaboration before, be it passing shapefiles around, 'enterprise GIS' of working against a common database, or even all the explorers contributing to the first map of the world. Internet Scale means that people who you have never met before are potential collaborators. And to me this is the most interesting of collaborations, and is the reason that ‘collaboration’ is so exciting these days, as groups of people are making things together on a scale never imagined before.

“Architectures of Participation” – Coined by Tim O’Reilly To achieve ‘internet scale’ collaboration I like to use the term ‘architectures of participation’. First used by Tim O’Reilly, it’s a useful lens to view encouraging collaboration – building the right structures so that people you’ve never met before can easily join your effort. 3

• World Wide Web (and web 2.0): … Examples of Architectures of Participation: • Linux: First open software project that truly empowered potential contributors Open Source Software, no single company controls it, lots of different companies contribute. IBM, Novell, Intel, Oracle, Google Anyone can download Linux for free, but if you improve it you are obliged to share those improvements with all. • Wikipedia: Very low barrier to entry, lets anyone get involved in the area they know • Firefox: Brought participation to ‘marketing’ — raising awareness of the product • World Wide Web (and web 2.0): … ———————— NEXT: A Definition… 4

An “Architecture of Participation” is both social and technical, leveraging the skills and energy of users as much as possible to cooperate in building something bigger than any single person or organization could alone. A Definition: An “Architecture of Participation” is both social and technical, leveraging the skills and energy of users as much as possible to cooperate in building something bigger than any single person or organization could alone. Social AND Technical • It is not possible to simply focus on one, to take the other as a given • Community won’t work right if the technical doesn’t support it properly — can’t make it too hard to participate • Technical can’t do anything if there’s no community — can’t just build and assume people will come 5

Architectures of Participation Software: The first domain to see benefits The process can be applied to other fields But software was only the first domain to see the incredible benefits of successful architectures of participation Steven Weber is clear in his book that the process can be applied to other fields, most any digital good has high potential The key is governance and collaboration across organizations and individuals to work together. If you architect it right you can achieve collaboration at an internet scale ———————— 6

04/26/10 In many ways software was a very logical first candidate. For one its practitioners were the closest to the medium that makes massive collaboration possible – the internet. And it also has an open, collaborative history - the first software wasn't even thought of as valuable. The movement to make open, collaborative software was started in reaction to others trying to ‘close’ the software development process. It was on this fertile ‘open’ ground that internet scale collaboration of linux was able to emerge.

Geospatial? But is geospatial a domain with the potential for this internet scale collaboration? It does start in a different place than software. Maps are historically a source of power - phillip II of spain kept his maps under lock and key. They enabled kings to conquer and rule - with good foreign maps they could claim territory or outflank an enemy. With good maps of property they could tax their people. So it doesn’t have a history of openness, but it is now all just digital information that can be instantly copied with out denying it to anyone else. 8

Collaboration Evolution Open Source Software vs Geospatial The cool thing is that in the last few years geospatial has been proven as a viable candidate for internet scale collaboration. But the coolest thing is that if we look at where open source has gone we can see that we’re possibly only just now at the tipping point where it grows to become the new standard. So to highlight where we’re at I’m going to show some of the open source software milestones, and where we’re at in geospatial. 9

True Believers - GNU/Linux, was the first project that really took advantage of the internet. Linus's big innovation was to truly open up control, and allow merit to rise to the top. The innovation was mostly 'social', with some key technical tools that helped enable the social. OpenStreetMap, started in reaction to heavily proprietary UK data policies. They built most all their initial tools from scratch, and many were quite hard to use, but they made them just useful enough to achieve their only goal – to make a map. While initially centered in the UK they made the tools applicable for the whole world. In the early days for both it was close to impossible to see that they could possibly be successful at their goals, since they were so ambitious. Anyone working on it clearly had a believer with a whole lot of faith. 10

Acceleration But the great thing about internet collaboration is that the building blocks never go away, so each new person that comes along adds to what’s come before. After the true believers comes a stage of acceleration, where the people showing up don’t no longer have to believe in a dream - it’s actually something that is minimally useful to a small number of people, and they join up as it is a way to accomplish what they want to. - With Linux we started to see more contributors, and more people building on top of it. It became useful enough for some dedicated uses. It also started to be a base for other open source projects that borrowed the same ethos, but experimented differently with the communities and made different software. - With OSM some areas start to be useful enough for a background map, and some very constrained areas actually start to have _better_ map coverage. 11

Company Involvement A major turning point is when big companies see it as way for them to potentially compete. They often depend on a proprietary component that is expensive or even belongs to a competitor. So they turn to collaboration for strategic reasons, starting to invest to see if it can evolve to be where they’d need it to be to be really useful. After this happens a lot more people start to notice and pay attention. Linux, IBM, Novell, HP, Intel (get good list of early ones) all started investing in linux, not just using it but contributing to make it better. - We are just seeing the start of this, with MapQuest, Yahoo! and Microsoft all getting behind OpenStreetMap in a serious way, plus many other companies building on top of it. 12

Explosion At this point in our story we continue on with just Open Source Software. I don’t believe geospatial has had the explosion yet, which in some ways is incredible because it has come so far. But the success of open source software is astounding. Though there are many chapters within this explosion we’ll just lay out the basics as a preview to what’s ahead for geospatial. - Lots of different software emerges, not just the lower level stuff, but browsers, development programs, web servers, programming languages, GIS, etc. - The governance and community structures become well understood and supported, with resources to read, and free infrastructure like sourceforge. - Well understood licenses, big companies are no longer scared of open source, it isn’t ‘fringe’. - Open Source business models emerge after companies try many different things. 13

Maturity And through those steps it becomes the dominant form of software development, with every large software company depending upon and building open source in some way. There are published books, like producing open source software, on collaboration Multiple options for free infrastructure to make open projects – github, google code, apache foundation Most every large company has an open source strategy of some sort, and most are contributing and starting new projects The tools and processes of collaboration become the mainstream tools for collaboration around software, even where it’s not fully open. 14

Geospatial Collaboration Status On the verge of explosion - On the verge of explosion - Many great projects, which we will hear about today - A few 'issues' to figure out. 15

Geospatial Data Creation Sharing Two major categories of geospatial collaboration, which will eventually converge: Shared collection, creation and maintenance of geospatial data. - Sharing of geospatial layers Creation Sharing 16

Sharing Layers 04/26/10 - Traditional realm of SDI's - Mashups and KML Infrastructures like GeoCommons, with ArcGIS.com and GeoNode/WorldMap are emerging as more interoperable, web services oriented, social and collaborative platforms Most are still focused on sharing data and maps, with decent styling. It is a bit fragmented, and none has really critical mass or interoperability, but they certainly point the way forward, to have user friendly web-focused sharing instead of mere services and heavy-weight catalogs of information that no one can access.

Geo Data Creation: OpenStreetMap MapShare™ - With geospatial data creation and maintenance OpenStreetMap is the clear leader. Google is pushing hard on mapmaker, and tomtom is taking driving tracks and putting them in to maps. All of these are focused on base maps / roads. Ushahidi is one that gets out of the base map, and manages some ‘internet scale’ for crisis events. And OpenGeo and Esri both have collaboration tools, but neither yet gets to real ‘internet scale’ Today we’re going to hear a lot more in depth and about current geospatial collaboration, so I’ll hold off on going deep in to any of it. But I do want to talk a bit about some of the current ‘areas for improvement’ that I see. 18

Current Issues in Geospatial Collaboration The ‘gotchas’ previous 19

Current Issues: Licensing? ODbL vs Licensing is still in a confused state. Geo data projects are still using creative commons, despite the fact that CC doesn’t believe their licenses apply to geospatial data, and there for wouldn’t defend them. The OpenStreetMap people have moved over to ODbL, but they are the only major user, and it hasn’t had the marketing effort that CC has had The norms around open geodata use still aren’t established and well known, making large companies and governments nervous. This happened with Open Source as well, but it rested on better legal grounds, and the Open Source Initiative also did lots of work to educate people.

Current Issues: The ‘open’ seduction vs I won’t go fully in to the issue, as it’s worth a whole talk unto itself. You should read Mikel’s last couple blog posts if you haven’t already. But the crux of the matter is that Google is coopting a lot of good geospatial collaboration to go towards their bottom line. They encourage lots of great participation in Africa and other places, but don’t make the data open for all. People can use it in their google maps, but it doesn’t go in to a commons. This is a real problem, but thankfully microsoft and AOL are on our side (yes, we live in a strange world). http://brainoff.com for more info

Current Issues: Community monoculture ? or vs Right now there is only one real community doing geospatial data collaboration, and it has one set of norms. There aren’t projects with alternate licenses, alternate tools, or alternate governance models. There is less innovation on different ways of working together. I believe with software it’s very good when there is more than one project doing the same thing, to get competition and innovation.

Current Issues: Raster Collaboration ? ? ? vs OpenAerialMap was a great idea to get a similar type of infrastructure to open street map, but for aerial and satellite imagery. But it takes an order of magnitude more resources, and at the time depended almost primarily on organizations donating their existing holdings. Thankfully now we have things like Jeffry Warren’s grassroots mapping flying kites and balloons, but we still lack an awesome open infrastructure to put it on. Though MapQuest did put all 4 terabytes of NAIP imagery up, and may be willing to help for more. But there are technical challenges to be solved in the contribution process. ? ?

Current Issues: Tool Bifurcation VS vs Potlatch Tools are bifurcated between 'amateurs' and 'experts’, and there is no interoperability, different tools for different infrastructures. There are some really great tools, especially on the amateur side, and both sides are evolving, but don’t seem to be really meeting to let people choose which tool they want to edit the same infrastructure.

The Future Steps towards Geospatial Collaboration Maturity So what does the future hold? What’s needed to get towards real maturity? 25

Towards Maturity: Licensing Flesh out a range of licenses for geospatial data From MIT style to GPL style Form a foundation to promote, educate and market Could be pushing/funding Open Data Commons Establish more norms around the licensing edge cases The education and norms is the big thing for me, so that we can have people realize the tradeoffs of going with something like google. We need to build awareness of what open collaboration is all about. And it’s totally fine to do non-open collaboration, it has an important place, but it should be a solid ecosystem with people understanding what they’re getting in to. Ideally we have a foundation, that can push open licenses that enable collaboration as default options in commercial products, like Creative Commons managed with Flickr.

Towards Maturity: Workflow vs One of the first things for me is to start to build new types of workflows and communities around geospatial collaboration. Currently we have a wikipedia model, of one Open Street Map that everyone puts information in, and rollbacks are made by a wide, vigilant array of people. I think as we move in to more niche geospatial collaboration we may not be able to count on a lot of people always watching. It’d be great to have innovation on workflow, possible higher QA to start. In open source projects you don’t let anyone commit to your repository, you have a serious vetting process to make sure people who have the right to commit are good and dedicated. In geospatial we also may be able to leverage more automated tools, to run validation checks against commits and automatically reject bad code.

Towards Maturity: Scope vs I think it’s really important to start to get collaboration around different layers. Makes sense for OSM to be the ‘linux’, the operating system that other data gets overlaid on. But that top data should be its own collaborations, that OSM can decide to pull in or not, but doesn’t have to all be in the same place, operating the same way.

Towards Maturity: OpenAerialMap! vs I think it’s essential that we figure out open collaboration around raster data. It’s the basis for good vector data It is expensive to gather, but there is also a whole ton of it that is being gathered, and some will give it away for free. Grassroots mapping is clearly innovating, but we need to make it super easy for anyone who gathers that type of data to put it on an infrastructure that is accessible and they don’t have to worry about.

Towards Maturity: Geospatial Patch Format that encapsulates an ‘edit’ on any system that can be reviewed by a human Interoperable between different editing systems OSM, MapMaker, OpenGeo, ESRI Easy visualizations and conflict resolution vs

Towards Maturity: Collaboration Hubs Logical extension of GeoCommons, ArcGIS.com, GeoNode, WorldMap But interoperable with one another But not just styling, but also handle editing and versioned editing Community tools like issue trackers, mailing lists, etc. Github/sourceforge for geospatial vs

Towards Maturity: Tools Editing tools that are accessible and also good enough for experts Advanced workflow management Sandboxes, approval before acceptance Automatic validation (topology, required fields) Branches and merging with Conflict Resolution Automatic change notification email / rss Integrated metadata, automatic tracking of all inputs and outputs Workflow management needs lots of techniques to perform all the checks and double checks that you all routinely do. And need to make that even easier, and to be compatible with lots of potential suggestions and contributions Also better UI, to encourage more contributions, and make it easier to take back vandalisms

Towards Maturity: Open Geospatial Business Models Hosted Services Geocoding, Route finding, Custom Tiles Guarantee of accuracy / indemnity Enable private collaboration around additional layers, like github (open is free, private is paid) Value add packaging - formats, documentation, software Subscription to latest updates On demand custom gathering of data, but in to an open collaborative map

Towards Maturity: Government role Step back from collecting all data Encourage citizens and agency collaboration around common base maps Perform Quality Assurance and gathering of data where there is none Provide stamp of ‘authoritative’ data that can be trusted

Towards Maturity: Cooperation Align efforts so that amateur, commercial, NGO and governmental creators all naturally collaborate Figure out workflows, tools and licenses that work for everyone Interoperability between various efforts, though diverse communities make a healthy ecosystem Towards living data, constantly evolving - authoritative and always up to date Right now many of the efforts are done as work arounds or are active protests against closed policies of NMCAs Future will see all different players working on maintaining the same layers To get there need to figure out the workflows, tools and licenses that can lead to aligning incentives so all work together National Mapping Agencies need to figure out how to get the incentive structure and ease of use to work with the ‘authoritative’ and ‘official’ value provided.

My Geospatial Collaboration Goal Let’s build a Geospatial Web that’s so compelling and easy-to-use that everyone: Citizens, Governments, NGO’s and Companies all naturally collaborate towards the same infrastructure for public good. My SDI/GeoWeb Goal And my sub goal, put the GIS professionals back at the center, instead of just producing data for everyone else. ———————— NEXT: Learn More… 36

Thank you These slides are available at http://presentations.opengeo.org/2011_Harvard This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Share Alike Attribution License. Please attribute Chris Holmes, and keep the OpenGeo.org logo on all slides, unless alternate permission is given. Contact cholmes@opengeo.org for more information