The importance of community in geospatial
Transcript of the talk as delivered:
Hello everyone – or I suppose I should say bula! Kia ora! Namaste! As-salamu alaykum!
I know from the introduction yesterday I’ve missed many greetings. So find me and tell me your greetings and tell me about where you are from, I know I have a lot to learn about all your cultures here in the pacific. This is my first time here, and it is a long way from where I live in Oregon in the United States. I thank you all for your welcomeness and hospitality.
I wasn’t really planning to present here at PGRSC. I was hesitant to propose a talk; I’ll be honest, as a white man coming to the pacific for the first time, I didn’t want to presume I had something valuable or useful to say. Yesterday though, I was inspired listening to the talks, and pulled this together. Forgive me, I don’t have slides, but I think that’ll be okay because I’m going to tell you a bit of a story.
Let me begin by telling you all a bit more about me and why I am here.
I am a geospatial software engineer at Element 84. We are a professional services company primarily working with customers in the United States and Europe. In my work there I do many things, but my role primarily revolves around two main focuses:
- architecting and building data orchestration pipelines for satellite data providers and large-scale data analytics, and
- working in open source, specifically with cloud-native geospatial technologies like the STAC ecosystem, low-level details of cloud-native data formats, and API specifications.
Because of this involvement with open source, I have been privileged to participate in conferences like FOSS4G. Last year I went to the conference in Belem, Brazil and met many amazing people from the geospatial community, in particular Kammy, who, if you don’t know her, lives here in Suva.
She just took me shopping, if you all couldn’t tell.
I am only here today to listen to you all and learn about the work that you all are doing because of that community, because of that connection with Kammy.
I also attended FOSS4G in Auckland last week and it was an amazing experience. I got to collaborate with many key people in my focus area of cloud-native, but also got to hear from users and developers in other specializations. I came away from that experience with a long list of things to learn more about, projects to work on, and new ideas to investigate and prototype. Not only that, but I was able to share my work and ideas with others, to help them in their journeys.
I’ve mentioned cloud-native geospatial several times now. Cloud-native is a big focus of my work. The idea with cloud-native, if you are not familiar, is use data formats that can be efficiently accessed over the network and store your data archives in cloud object store services like AWS S3. Then you can leverage tooling designed to efficiently work with those formats to build processing flows parallelized at scale using cloud compute services.
I’m happy to talk more about this cloud-native thing if you have questions. Come find me. Or Alex. Or Nick. But my point is not to explain cloud-native in this talk.
Rather, I want to talk about a couple concerns of mine:
- First, major open data programs are at risk
- second, cloud-native tools and formats are moving forward at a rapid pace, and I get concerned users might get left behind
To the first of these, we see programs like Landsat being threatened by politics, as Andiswa mentioned yesterday. The European Space Agency’s sentinel program is similarly at risk of being locked down in certain ways due to increasing geopolitical tensions.
Alex, what is the sentinel 2 data source for the digital earth programs? We have that on AWS in E84’s Earth Search data catalog available for free, thanks to AWS’s support. Except political tensions between ESA and AWS are threatening the future of maintaining that data catalog.
On the tooling and formats side, ESA is currently moving forward with their plan to convert the entire sentinel archive to zarr format. Landsat and other NASA/USGS datasets might not be far behind. This is a major format change, and may mean that tools will not be compatible with those data products for some time, at least not until they can be updated to support the new format. And users that don’t understand this or how to work with this new format might get left behind.
These concerns, I think, are a problem of representation.
I don’t know what to do about the political problems, these risks to open data. I think the best answer is to make noise. If you don’t think you have a voice, find allies that do to amplify yours. Leverage our geospatial community.
Events like this are a great way to engage that community. As we’ve seen in some presentations today, you can also organize or participate in local GIS clubs, or international groups like ISPRS.
But of course, I’m a bit biased and would also suggest OSGeo.
And this gets at my second point about tooling: get involved! Open source tools and technologies underlie everything we use. QGIS is open source. ESRI products and Google Earth Engine are not open source, but they are built on top of open source projects like python and gdal. Many other tools like jupyter notebooks and R are open source.
So talk with the OSGeo folks like Alex, Greg, and Ewen. Join OSGeo Oceania! Go to the conferences, both regional and international. Travel grants are often available. Meet and talk with users. Meet and talk with developers, like me. Make issues and pull requests on GitHub.
Admittedly, with cloud-native geospatial, I believe we have an education problem. Education is a key goal of mine, and I have been working with the Cloud Native Geospatial Forum on defining a better curriculum and creating better resources for users. I, and many others, create workshops every year to present at FOSS4G conferences, on cloud native tools and other topics.
But I don’t know what you don’t know. I don’t know what you want to know. I don’t know what gaps you all are seeing.
Again, representation.
If you can tell us what you need – training, tooling, data – we just might be able to help.
I am only here because of FOSS4G. It has enriched my life and given me some of my best friends. It has also given me my career. So I encourage you, if you are not already, to get involved with OSGeo and OSGeo Oceania and join the open source community. Or, if nothing else, just come talk to me, because at the very least, I want to get to know you all and hear more about what you all are doing.
Vinaka vakalevu.