Un-lurking briefly to say that this may be simultaneously the most candid and funniest post I've read on this list. Minor quibbles and joking aside, I think it fairly well describes the juncture we face in the industry (for lack of more precise term) today. I believe Benkler's thesis about the virtues of peer production, yet it's not something that's helping me put bread on the table (ATMO). While business models are emerging, I think it will take some time before the broader community of geospatial professionals figure out how to build a successful business around FOSS. In the meantime, there is a lot of important and groundbreaking....um, wanking going on.
Steven -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Stephen Coast Sent: Friday, January 04, 2008 9:55 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Geowanking] goodchild VGI paper On 4 Jan 2008, at 11:56, stephen white wrote: > Hell, you even have Einstein in a bunny suit! Meanwhile, none of you > are doing anything interesting. It's being left to other companies > like Google and Microsoft and Earthmine to actually do stuff worthy of > notice, so you may as well pack up your pots and pans and tin foil > helmets and go work for the corporate man! There's actually a fair amount of truth to this, in that that's what they think. None of the following is particularly intended as an attack but rather that I can understand the different points of view and motivations in the current structure of things. Talking to G is a bit pointless, but other companies don't care much about any of us. They're all wedded to the current paradigm which has a lot of life left yet. How is OpenLayers going to help Microsoft? Or Yahoo? Or whoever? GeoRSS is the most hyped XML snippet you can find. OSM's useless as South Bumfuck, Ohio isn't complete yet. Microsoft bought their own camera firm and fly imagery, how are a bunch of losers with kites and Nokia camera phones at openaerial going to help, really, other than hype and yet another thing you can do with Google Earth? I'd argue that our greatest commercial contribution so far has been the hype that they use to sell the dream, and get another 1,000 downloads of Earth. If you look where the pesos are going it's to traditional assets. Lots of money for data, planes, lots of NIH tech. The odd free iPod or something if you invent GeoRSS or geotag over 1,000 photos. In terms of budget, clearly we're just wanking to most firms as the dollars are flowing elsewhere. (its pretty unclear to me what the autodesk consortium / pyramid scheme actually does or where the money goes). I think the VGI meeting (which was great and I was flying the OSM flag primarily) was divided in to three camps. Web 2.0 firms, Academia, Geo 1.0 firms (ESRI, TA, NT, aerial imagery). If you look at where the money flows in each, they're all very different. It's Eyeballs for ads / service software for web 2.0, the next grant for academia and software as product / data services for the latter. Thus I get the impression that none particularly meshes with each other brilliantly. Web 2.0 firms tend to have their own private XEROX PARCs and buy people in from academia. Academia wants the next research grant but tends not to own anything or be tied to any particular set of ideas. Geo 1.0 firms are focused on assets like data and software, the exception being ESRI which is agnostic and doing interesting things with the other two sets of people. So academia is pretty easy, it's the next cool thing to get a grant. Clearly there's a lot of cool things on this list. Geo 1.0 are largely absent apart from personal interests. TA / NT are far more interested in getting bought right now than worrying if one day OSM will rip the biz model away. I don't think ESRI lose a lot of sleep over the latest bizarre open source GIS but there's a lot of interesting things they'll do with people who have actual money and products (like Earth) for the simple reason that the users want it. I don't particularly buy the neogeography-for-world-peace line, not that it's not worthy. People in disaster zones don't care much about pirating software and data so you have a hard time pushing qgis and OSM. But maybe next decade. As far as OSM goes, the longer we're thought of as a rag-tag bunch of volunteers the better. Google hired Varian to be their chief economist while everyone else is wondering how to apply chapter 4 of Information Rules to their business and haven't even read Benkler so they don't know that peer production is just more efficient than markets and firms. So the less research done, and the more hippy we appear, the more time we have to complete mapping various sections of the planet. Please look the other way and go implement GeoRSS for sheep tracking in Earth using kite photography for free for the UN, don't worry houses will be much cheaper post-crash so you won't need money. So it's all wanking, but it's still all a lot of fun. have fun, SteveC | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.asklater.com/steve/ _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
