Open source inspired workflows for open (and closed) geospatial data

Open source software is produced by distributed teams rarely in the same place at the same time, rarely working on the same thing at the same time, yet they consistently produce better results than their closed source and proprietary counterparts. A big part of their continued success is open source's unique workflow and tools. What would it look like to treat geospatial data with the same respect that open source developers treat their code? What if we took the tools and workflows of open source and used them to create collaborative geospatial tools and datasets, even if that data was ultimately never public?

Transcript

1. ! Open source inspired workflows 
 for open (and closed) geospatial data @benbalter government@github.com government.github.com
2. ! 1. How open source got here 2. Where geodata is today 3. What data publishers can learn
3. ! Open source ≠ published code
4. ! Open source as a philosophy
5. ! Open Source (software)
 software that can be freely used, modified, and shared 
 (in both modified and unmodified form) by anyone
6. ! Open Source
 a philosophy of collaboration in which working materials are made available online for anyone to fork, modify, discuss, and contribute to.
7. ! Open source as a workflow
8. ! Open source workflows must be location- and time-agnostic
9. ! Wikipedia v. Encyclopedia Britannica
10. ! A brief history of 
 open source tooling
11. ! In the beginning, we had drawers
12. PDP-1 (or so I’m told)
13. Open source at the Tech Model Railroad Club
14. ! We eventually upgraded to email
15. ! ...and FTP
16. ! ...and the read-only web
17. ! 1. Had to be there 2. Had to know them 3. Had to be perfect
18. ! This is where (geo)data is today
19. ! Computering is hard
21. ! You are constantly one character away from crashing the entire site
22. Version Control * 2d96cfe - (HEAD, tag: v3.1.1, origin/master, origin/HEAD, master) :gem: bump (43 minutes ago) <Ben Balter> * f4b446b - remove stray backtick (44 minutes ago) <Ben Balter> * 83599e3 - Merge branch 'master' of https://github.com/benbalter/g-man (46 minutes ago) <Ben Balter> |\ | * 42514ea - Merge pull request #61 from devscott/laxco (50 minutes ago) <Ben Balter> | |\ | | * 072d9b5 - Adding in additional entry for La Crosse County, WI (54 minutes ago) <Scott Sloan> | |/ * | 1e95d95 - remove unresolvable domains (46 minutes ago) <Ben Balter> * | 1a8645a - remove uwyo.edu/CES (86 minutes ago) <Ben Balter> |/ * 70410ba - Merge pull request #60 from jpmckinney/canada (2 hours ago) <Ben Balter> |\ | * a77ad43 - Use consistent comments for Canada hosts (2 hours ago) <James McKinney> | * 1776e45 - Add more Canadian hosts (2 hours ago) <James McKinney> * | 05211a0 - Merge pull request #58 from mitio/bulgarian-government-domains (3 hours ago) <Ben Balter> |\ \ | * | fe8f862 - Add Bulgaria's government main domain (3 hours ago) <Dimitar Dimitrov> | |/ * | 85d0c7b - Merge pull request #59 from mitio/fix-readme-typos (3 hours ago) <Ben Balter> |\ \ | |/ |/| | * f558a90 - Add missing word in the readme (3 hours ago) <Dimitar Dimitrov>
23. ! Version control tracks who made what change when
24. ! Author publishes User downloads User finds a bug User submits 
 a patch
25. ! Is this a bug? Has anyone else experienced this? Is this the best solution?
 Can someone help test this? Can you release a new version with the fix? Email all the things!
26. ! The instructions to contribute to the linux kernel is 50,000 words
27. ! Collaborative version control Decentralized & social
28. ! Decentralized Everyone has the opportunity to contribute
29. ! Social Everything happens in the open and by people
30. ! Standardized Don't need to RTFM
31. ! Captures and exposes process Proposed alternatives, what decision was made, why
32. ! Is this a bug? Has anyone else experienced this? Is this the best solution?
 Can someone help test this? Can you release a new version with the fix? (Google and then) post all the things!
33. ! "Anyone is encouraged to contribute to the project by forking and submitting a pull request. (If you are new to GitHub, you might start with a basic tutorial.)" Contributing to whitehouse/petitions
34. ! Open source ≠ published code
35. ! Open source ≠ published code
36. ! Open source ≠ published code
37. ! Three lessons geodata can 
 learn from open source
38. ! 1. Prefer open formats to increase potential for data consumers
39. ! Purpose-built, proprietary tools
41. Shapefile GeoJSON
42. ! 2. Adopt shared standards
44. ! Foster Open standards
46. ! 3. Free tightly held data
47. ! Published data
49. ! Open data
51. ! Collaborative data
53. ! Bonus: collaborative tools
55. ! Your first (or second) step
56. ! Don't make multi-year, multi-million dollar investments on a hunch for what developers might find useful
57. ! 1. Establish a "data" repository
58. ! 2. Publish all the data you can
63. ! Open source inspired workflows 
 for open (and closed) geospatial data @benbalter government@github.com government.github.com
64. ‣ PDP-1 — flickr.com/photos/hiddenloop/307119987/ ‣ Punch Card Decks — mehul panchal, via Wikimedia Commons Photo credits