Welcome to the age of the open ecosystem
A bit tardy blogpost, which I had ‘in concept’ for a while but could not find the time to finish it. A few weeks ago I gave a short presentation at the Open Source GIS Conference and the title of this blogpost was on one of my slides. My talk was about innovation, open innovation, the role of users; then on to value, value chains, value systems, and how they are effected by open data; I argued that active (user/developer) communities are key and ended with a few applications, which are based on open data.
I also argued that working with open data is hard, as it extends the boundaries of organizations. Value chains are growing into multi-dimensional chains, and open ecosystems. My hope is that, thanks to open data, new value chains will arise and new value will surface (I do not mind the copy/past value chains, they are just not that interesting to me).
During lunch I did have a few interesting conversations about lead users/developers in the open community and how they tend to join the existing players (ie. Google/Microsoft/Esri) and about the maturity of the various GIS products (not an exclusive OS topic, but it somehow always makes it to the agenda; as do projection systems!). What was new to me: my presentation was videotaped (and I had to give permission for that). Some of the references I made during the presentation may now seem out of context. (cannot find the link to the video for now…)
I am really sorry I missed out on the Dutch day of this event. The announcement promised a “debate on ‘open vs closed source’”, which I could not discover in the programme itself. Innovation and business cases would have been interesting topics as well, maybe next time! Mega kudos (again) to the local organizers. I know that putting an event like this together is a lot of work and it sometimes does not work out the way things were planned (e.g FOSS4G 2012 has been cancelled, although the website is still up and running; Nottingham to the rescue!).
NB: do note: the GeoIQ folks have joined the Esri family! This looks like a –smart- move. Looking forward to meet up with them at the Esri International User Conference in San Diego!
Jan Willem van Eck (@JWvanEck) 28-06-12 12:21
Vreselijk… “@mwConference: The recordings of the keynote of @JWvanEck is online: bit.ly/osgeo12P02 #geonl #osgeonl
had tweeted that video myself…