Goals¶
OpenGeo’s goal is to build open software that helps share and understand geospatial information. We believe that doing so will help build a truly open geospatial web of information - infrastructure for a new layer of transparency. Our The ultimate goal is to help everyone be able to find and use any information that has a spatial component. Location makes the increasing overload of information more relevant - it is one of the most useful filters available. We share the visions of augmented reality, ambient findability and human connection through geospatial technology. But we want to ensure that it’s built on a public, open infrastructure - not dominated by any single point of control, just like the world wide web. To do this we seek to align the incentives of governments, ngos, citizens, companies and consumers in to real geospatial collaboration on the base information.
Our particular focus has been on helping governments open the information they have, and our next step is to hone in on data collaboration. Helping governments gather and maintain geospatial data more efficiently, and helping non governmental groups do the same. We are particularly interested in the intersection between the two, how governments can collaborate with companies and individuals around common geospatial information, reducing the replication in gathering it. So we’re working towards helping governments be able to leverage crowdsourcing in an effective way that lets them lower costs while still validating and meeting their public requirements.
Our dream is to play a small role in enabling true collaboration, to bring the amazing power of open source to not just geospatial information, but to how we govern ourselves. To help move from a society where ‘the government’ is something remote and abstract, to a way where we all collaborate to make our lives better. At the core of this is a belief in openness, helping personal transformation to a state where everyone doesn’t look to cover their asses, but we are open about our faults and where we need help, and from there we can all start to work together.
Focus¶
We limit ourselves in our goals - to geospatial, and to building software. We limit so we can achieve more in a narrow domain, to have success in a niche. Geospatial is a great place to be, as it cross cuts most every domain, and offers real value as a visualization of raw data. We focus on software because we started as a software developers. And it has a wonderful quality of being able to give all our work away without it costing us any additional time or effort, so we can have a much broader impact. Focusing on infrastructure and tools allows others to innovate on top and take it in additional directions. We do however always seek to involve ourselves in projects that directly touch users, citizens and consumers, so that we are always grounded in reality, not just building tools and infrastructure for our imagination. In time we hope to have more directly user facing applications that we make ourselves, and that becomes more and more likely as the core tools are ever more mature. But we will continue to focus our efforts, and likely spin off different OpenGeo type organizations that can make a similar impact. But we seek to keep OpenGeo itself always focused on software and core geospatial software.
A model¶
Another goal of OpenGeo is to experiment with organizational structures. We believe that modern corporations are not ideally suited for open source and indeed the larger trend of collaboration in this networked reality. And neither are non-profits as they exist now. Social Enterprise is slouching towards the right idea, but it encompasses so many different kinds of structures as to be almost meaningless. There are some great initiatives working in similar directions, like Mozilla’s Corporation/Foundation structure, and B-corps. We hope to be part of what we believe to be a greater trend in working towards new, more appropriate structures. We are driven by a mission, not by money, but we actively want to compete in the market. We desire to do things more efficiently, but with the goal of a better society, not more money for those who started it. We are working towards a self sustainability where we can hopefully throw off enough money to incubate more organizations that are similar to OpenGeo. The best of these will be grown to strong, independent self-sustaining nodes in our network, and hopefully each innovates with market and mission in different ways. Hopefully we can find a structure that is at least more appropriate towards making open source software, where investments can be made by venture philanthropists to create self-sustaining software producers that help make a better world.
