Mapping Hacks

Last summer at the Open Source Geospatial conference in Minneapolis, Dirk Willem van Gulik gave a closing keynote talk in which he talked about his experience of establishing the Apache Software Foundation, a pioneering example of open source governance and meta-organisation. Dirk Willem’s message partially was: “don’t do what we did.”

At the time Sean Gillies commented on the message of Dirk Willem’s talk:

Instead of bringing answers, he reminds us of questions that we should be asking not of him, but of each other. Which brand is it that we want to promote and defend? Do some of our projects need to be more open? Is our community one of individuals, or of corporate bodies? There are lessons from the ASF, but we are really going to need something more organic.

Fast forward 8 months, to the bootstrap meeting of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation in Chicago on February 4th, at which 25 people representing a broad cross-section of different software projects became the voting membership. Since then, the foundation has been focused on finding its own foundation; creating a basis for governance and presence; this has involved two more rounds of voting, to widen the base of voting members who select the initial board members; I was amazingly honoured to become one of them. The beginning has just begun for the foundation, there’s a lot of work to do, and I want to keep bearing Sean’s questions in mind as OSGeo works towards building something that people will want to help with, because it is helping them do what they want to do, and making it easier to do things that they don’t enjoy having to do.

During the bootstrap stages of the Foundation, Chris Holmes has been exploring in public the idea of A Foundation of Participation, and now I’m re-reading his writing on the subject with a fresh pair of eyes.

The other main difference I see from the Apache Foundation is that we’re looking to do ‘more’… What we’re looking to do is more cross sectional, but focused on a single domain - GIS, instead of just software in general.

In software terms, the nature of the domain means that there is already an amazing level of cross-project collaboration; Geoserver builds on Geotools and redistributes Mapbuilder; QGIS exports Mapserver configuration files, can use GRASS as a backend, all get their power from the foundational GDAL/OGR. PostGIS, while not an OSGeo code project, has a key role in unifying different “stacks”. Clearly defined open standard interfaces (particularly WMS and WFS-T) make it easier for projects working towards the same shared goals, to communicate with each other through easily-agreed-on abstractions describing what is being shared; to collaborate on building something more whole, without significant extra effort in the parts. Sharing data, re-using and re-presenting it in different ways, is a kind of “prime directive” for geospatial software, and that informs the way people who are building it, interact.

There is “something more organic” here; a common vision expressed in software, in a software domain focused towards better and more open models of the world around us. OSGeo almost doesn’t need to focus on communication between projects, because so much of it is already happening between the protagonists. So part of a foundation’s role becomes, to create a space where people who are new to geospatial, or new to open source, “can find a group of supportive people, and a structure that can bootstrap them to bring the idea to reality“.

This is something that being involved with the Open Knowledge Foundation has really provided for me over the last year; communication tools and a lot of conversational encouragement to create a place to stand on open access to geographic information issues, allowing more focused efforts to be created when enough people who cared, turned up in the same place. If people can see their contributions are valued by others, they become more likely to contribute in the future. OKFN aims to transplant a free software derived ethic and practise into the production of public domain information, this involves software development efforts to support that effort, but it also involves providing ways in which people can use their different interests and skills to make a contribution, to gain a sense of “belonging” by being in a conversation.

Chris continues, Many of us are thinking about the same types of things, such as opening geographic data, curriculum development, conferences, local user groups, etc. But there’s no obvious way to start up these things in the way that there is for an open source software project.

The Public Geospatial Data Project within OSGeo is an effort into which i want to translate a lot of energy; as Markus points out, “we’re really working out the process for starting a non-software based project as we go“. I’m looking forward to helping to create, with the group of people gathering there, a coherent stance on really implementing public access to open geodata, how it can work in very pragmatic terms.

There’s already a lot of blur between what the people committing to this project want to achieve, and what other OSGeo groupings want to do, especially with education and documentation; there’s a lot of blur between the promotion and web documentation oriented groups, too. The committee structures inside OSGeo seem helpful in terms of offering people a place to connect via their interests, participate in activity that is directly meaningful and useful to them, building a foundation through their direct actions, rather than worrying about where they fit in the constitution of a meta-representative body. I hope the different committees and projects maintain soft borders; that there are open interfaces, clearly defined, encouraging a non-software stack of activities which build on each others’ efforts, which work together conversationally as the software stack increasingly does.

In the bootstrap phase, there’s a definite productive tension. A hierarchical governance structure is supplied, because it is one that people recognise, it has been observed to work well to get people collectively to a certain point of mutual benefit. There is a warp and weft through it, of efforts that people are already making to support each other locally. A value system is being articulated in that warp and weft, described by the actions that people make. To get new people involved, it can help a lot to provide clear statements about those actions, to make it easier for people who could get a lot of benefit from the tools, to focus on similarities, rather than differences, in shared goals.
At this point I want to offer a reflection from Chris’s writing on Foundations of Participation: the social concerns

In time I feel the board should seek to obsolete itself. Of course it will always exist for the legal entity of the non-profit, but the ideal to me seems to be that the board just ushers along the community, that the power resides in the people actually doing things. A board position should ideally just reflect the work one is already doing.

If being in a foundation can make the work i am already doing easier, and then by doing that, i can help to build a better foundation that can be helpful to others in the future, then i will be overjoyed with that. I would like to plan for my own obsolence more usefully, and be able to think clearly about the reasons for doing so.

But most of all, I want being in a foundation to be fun.

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