GIS, Openness, and Leadership
Until recently, I taught a graduate-level course on leadership in GIS organizations. I had to step away from it when my own graduate work began to take too much time. Leadership, as specifically applied to GIS, is an interesting lens. My own course was mostly about leadership theory and its application, with a bit of GIS sprinkled in.
The aspect of the geospatial sector that most intrigued me was the value it places on “openness.” That takes the form of open-source software, open data, and open standards. After spending the past few years in a different sector of the technology industry, I came away realizing that the perception of openness as undesirable or risky is more widespread than I had considered.
The relative importance of openness in the geospatial sector as compared to others is most likely marginal, but there are at least active discussions and continued work. From WMS through to COG and GeoParquet, there is a clear arc of activity around openness in the geospatial sector that simply has no analog in most others.
I personally attribute this emphasis on openness to the outsize influence of government on the geospatial sector. Because the largest player in GIS software is privately held, a good analysis of verticals is hard to perform. Traditional market analyses also leave out open-source software, which tends not to be sold in a traditional manner. As a result, the impact of government remains mostly instinctual and anecdotal. We can all acknowledge government at all levels as the largest vertical in geospatial as we stand around chatting at conferences, but hard data is elusive.
Between numerous government budget reports and 10-K filings of the few publicly traded geospatial firms, we can begin to triangulate the influence of government. For example, Maxar’s 10-K filing dated 16 February 2022 states “more than half of our revenues [comes] from U.S. government customers.”
Why do I think this is important? Because, at least in the US, there is a general consensus that things paid for by the public sector should be open to the public. Many integrators are masterful at running the slaloms through this expectation to own IP they have developed for the public sector, which is disingenuous at the least. Software companies also do an excellent job of financial segmentation to ensure the public sector has no claim to software, with which I actually have very little problem. The influence of government tends to lead to an emphasis on open data and open standards to foster interoperability and ensure broad reach and low barriers to access for information produced by government.
So, if we accept that geospatial places greater value on openness in various forms, how does that emphasis relate to leadership and why was I drawn to it for my course? The purpose of the course was to help people who were at the beginning of their careers think about leadership and their approach to it in order to be effective leaders in their own right. My first principle with regard to leadership is that you first need to lead yourself. An organization or industry or sector that values openness provides more opportunities for individuals to lead and become leaders.
A tweet by my friend, Todd Barr, on open-source software, illustrates this concept perfectly.
In future issues, I’ll dig a little deeper into leadership as it relates to open source, open data, and open standards. Open structures, especially those consisting mostly of volunteers, present unique leadership opportunities and challenges as related to more hierarchical structures and I look forward to exploring them with you.
Thank you for reading.