Hi Joseph,
could you elaborate why "it would be unrealistic to say we
could ever be a 100% QGIS"? I am curious because I lost contact with
ESRI products a couple years ago.
Bernhard
Am 12.06.2015 um 19:23 schrieb Joseph Sloop:
To All,
I am glad to see the discussion and interest in QGIS in local government. I
have been interested in QGIS in local government for sometime now. I work
for MapForsyth| City-County Geographic Information Office in Forsyth
County, North Carolina (USA). We have and use both QGIS and ESRI products
(more of ESRI than QGIS). In our case it would be unrealistic to say we
could ever be a 100% QGIS (FOSS) shop at this point, but it is our goal to
have QGIS integrated with more of our departments and through time we will
be able to increase the use of QGIS.
I know from my experience, case studies and showing return on investment
(ROI) are very important to have and show decision makers. However, let us
not for get our IT departments, especially in local government. In our case
we partnered with them so they could see, understand, and ask questions
regarding QGIS or any open source software we use. I have found that they
are becoming some of our best supporters.
Some of my other thoughts are support and governance of QGIS
installations...best practices etc.
Just my two cents, but glad to see the discussion.
Cheers,
Joseph Sloop
On Fri, Jun 12, 2015 at 9:11 AM, Randal Hale <
[email protected]> wrote:
In the states it's all ESRI all day.
A few small governments might try to run in a FOSS4G direction but it's
rare. In the Southeast they go "what is the next town over doing? we will
do the same thing". The models that ESRI provide are tempting for many
because suddenly everyone is doing the exact same thing. So with no thought
- Gov't A can share with Gov't B. They feel as thought they are adhering to
a standard - of course a standard put forth by a software company.
My business is swinging in a more foss4g direction although I still use
ESRI software as many of my customers do - but it's getting rare. So rare I
opted to not renew my ESRI licensing this year. Many of my clients are
versions back so I can sit on 10.2 for a while. I still get "well that free
stuff can't be that good" but I'm slowly winning over clients as They are
getting very good data with qgis/postgis and the word is spreading. Yes
it's free but it's very professional.
Well - we seem to have started something - question is where do we go next
with this?
Randy
On 06/12/2015 04:34 AM, Andreas Neumann wrote:
Hi Steve,
Thank you for raising this important discussion.
In some European countries the situation is a bit different and Open
Source solutions are gaining an increasing market share. I live and work in
Switzerland - and while the majority of the markets still uses ESRI
products - there is an increasing number of provinces who also increasingly
use Postgis, QGIS, OpenLayers, etc - sometimes exclusively and sometimes
side by side with proprietary software.
I also think that the next couple of years we will see an increasing
number of governmental organisations introducing OpenSource GIS side by
side with commercial GIS and will gradually shift more and more
applications to FOSSGIS.
Some examples in Switzerland:
* The national mapping portal runs exclusively on OS software (Postgis,
OpenLayers, and some more) - it runs very well, fast and is very popular -
production of the data is still done exclusively in ESRI
* 2 provinces in Switzerland run exclusively in FOSSGIS, about 7 and 8
additional provinces introduced FOSSGIS side by side with commercial
products
* several cities and water/gaz providers are currently migrating to
FOSSGIS to document utility networks
* The austrian province "Vorarlberg" introduced several hundred
installations of QGIS as the main GIS in their administration
* several Scandinavian countries/provinces/cities are already using
FOSSGIS on both Desktop GIS and web mapping
The list would be much longer - but things are moving slowly and steadily
to more FOSSGIS usage in Europe - at least I can tell
There are two other interesting points:
* in my opinion - it is not so much about money - but about different
values: the ability to more easily influence the direction of the software,
support of open standards, integration with other FOSS software, etc.
* as an employee of a local government it is so much more interesting
being able to actively contribute to FOSS software rather than just using
software "as is".
As you can see above - it is more the "richer" countries that are moving
towards Open Source and fewer "poorer" countries. This indicates that the
factor "cost" is less important than people think.
Andreas
On 11.06.2015 22:28, Steve G wrote:
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.
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