Where is the GIS community…. Does Anybody Care?
Posted by Aaron VanWieren on 15 Aug 2007 at 07:07 am | Tagged as: Cartography And GIS, General Ramblings
I have been working in GIS Software Engineering and Development for a couple of years now and have often pondered the question “Where is the GIS community…. Does Anybody Care?”. Based on my experience, there is no such thing as a GIS user and/or developer community , instead there are loose connections containing blogs and sites with little discussion in the form of comments or cross blog interaction(Unless the discussion involves ESRI and/or ESRI licensing). To me, the concept of an online community composes a place where people with an interest in GIS and GIS development can go and be a part of something larger then themselves,a place of belonging, a third place, a common ground.
Concept of the “Third Place”
I think Scott Hanselman’s post on the “third place” conveys this idea best. In this sense a community would be a place or a common ground where we as GIS practitioners and developers can convey our thoughts and ideas as well as just share in a common joke, where we can discuss matters pertaining to important concerns we have as conveyors of digital spatial information.
Examples From other Industries
A successful example of a good community presence can be seen at the Code Project website. On this site, users are encouraged to contribute articles, there are forums for technical discussion and most importantly, there is a lounge for general chit chat. The site clearly and distinctly creates a feeling of community and has a devoted and growing group of regular users. To me, this site is a great example of “community”. Dave Bouwman attempted a similar site for GIS developers, arcdeveloper.net. But do to a lack of community and apparent interest he is now contemplating its future.
Conclusion
From my perspective, there is no distinct feeling of community on the internet by GIS practitioners or developers. I have noticed few comments from readers on this site and numerous other GIS blog sites, especially in posts relating to theoretical or “issue” based content. I know this is possible from my experiences with developer based communities. Maybe my take on this is wrong and I am not seeing the larger picture. Maybe I am oversimplifying this issue.
Is there hope for a Geospatial third place? I would like to think so….
What do you think?
Talk hard!!
Aaron,
Thanks for posting your thoughts. I agree. I think that the GIS (geospatial) community is fragmented, much in the same way that the industry as a whole is fragmented. I am not completely sure why that is, or how to articulate the various rationales that could be given.
Not sure if you have checked out BlinkGeo, but I set that site up with the hope of bringing some of the web’s new ’social networking’ aspects to the GIS community.
Essentially, my goal has been to establish a democratic, participatory model for people to exchange, highlight, and prioritize relevant information. To date it has been gaining momentum, but I am not sure if it will be successful in serving as a “third” place, as you have described/referenced. Who knows if there are enough GIS practitioners/developers who are willing to participate consistently enough to establish a true online community.
I do think that at some point though we all will have a third place…just not sure of where/when that will be. Hopefully sooner than later. In my opinion, we are overdue.
Cheers,
Andres
[…] GIS Dev Cafe is asking where is the community? A community needs a common […]
thinking of being IN the gis community, reading blogs, playing with that thing and trying to make my job with it, i see there is no main issue about the USE part in whole discussion. Theres a lot of technical discourse with coding and scripting and all, a constant bugfixing, updating, licensing with ESRI stuff, new features in models from google, yahoo, microsoft.
For me the most usful but kind of experimental views on spatial technology is expressed at ucl casa blogs.
I am most concerned with the analyzing part of GIS, what overall could be applied to socio-economical modelling.
And I am sure there is a lot of other ‘main interests’ from other users what makes the community scattered.
Andres,
Just signed up for blink geo and have added one of those fuzzy blue guys after each post. I think what blinkgeo is a really cool idea and glad to some one making a stab at something like it. I hope it proves successfull.
I am still rolling it over in my head why we don’t have a geographic group sense of community. And it is truly baffling that something has not come together yet.
On your point about third place mine is currently codeproject, a developer community I belong to.
Wish you luck with the site,
AAron W. VanWieren
www.gisdevcafe.com
Hmm. I think in Web 2.0 it’s hard to point at something and say that “That’s the GIS community”. We each build our own communities relative to our needs. For instance, mine looks something like:
- #OSGeo
- #MapGuide
- #PlanetGeospatial
- Google Geo stuff
- Miscellaneous GIS mailing lists
- Local government IT / GIS groups (BC)
Within this group of groups, there is a reasonable amount of cross-pollination, and because I’m active in most of them I’m known to many community members in each.
This is a GOOD THING. It allows each of us to pick and choose the parts of location technology (from traditional GIS through neogeography) and leave the REST for those who care. If there was one central community for GIS, I’d die of information overload.
-J
Atomek,
In development in general there are allot of disparate interests as well, but those people are still able to get together and and create groups and foster community. I don’t know if I buy the disparate idea too much.
Aaron W. Vanwieren
Jason Birch,
I see your point and I liked the REST comment carefully placed within. I don’t know if I totally agree, but maybe it is because I come to this from a development background where there is technically two basic groups, .net and java, everything else is just details. I know currently GIS development really does not seem to have an overall mentality. I hope to maybe flesh these thoughts out a little more in future posts as this was fairly general.
Maybe it is just the groupings of the communities are really small and very focussed. I really could see a common geospatial online meeting place where our primary commonality is our understanding of the word spatial. Whoa, I hear Lennon’s immagine, better go…
Aaron W. VanWieren
Aaron,
Thanks for joining BlinkGeo and for your participation. Looking forward to your future posts on the subject.
Cheers,
Andres
IMHO, GIs is like geography or law which have a variety of sub-disciplines. People tend to focus on their area(s) of specialty and lose contact or don’t communicate with the greater community as a whole.
It’s not a criticism. Time, interest, and other reasons are the driving force. But there are a few who communicate or stays in contact with the greater community as a whole. Or better yet, dives into the other sub-disciplines to view, create, and maintain communication across other sub-disciplines. Also, hopefully that cross-communication and maintance of contact will transfer over to the greater community.
KoS
Hi Aaron,
Interesting discussion. As the main founder of Slashgeo.org (non-profit and no ads), I’ve been wondering for a while about what is the geospatial community. Very Spatial even had an episode on the subject. You can read my personal analysis over this entry: http://industry.slashgeo.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/24/1745200
Regards,
Alex
Thanx Alex,
Will definately have to read that. Don’t know how I overlooked it in my weekly reading. I think this discussion has been very informative and if anything, has gotten the community talking to each other a little bit.
Aaron
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