A presentation of the underlying motivations and institutional context behind GeoNode, some of its major design decisions, and unresolved challenges for its sustainability. I gave this talk at UC Berkeley School of Information's research seminar on Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD). Much of the material comes from an older presentation I wrote with Rolando Peñate.

1. GeoNode Motivations, Design, and Challenges
Sebastian Benthall
UC Berkeley School of Information
ICTD Seminar
(Based on a presentation written with
Rolando Peñate
OpenGeo)

2. What is...

3. Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI)

4. Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI)
“[Spatial Data Infrastructure] provides a basis for spatial
data discovery, evaluation, and application for users and
providers within all levels of government, the commercial
sector, the non-profit sector, academia and by citizens in
general.”
– SDI Cookbook

5. The theory of SDI
developed before
we learned what was
possible with the Internet

6. Imagine...
...what an ideal SDI would be like

7. Imagine...
...an SDI that makes
uploading, sharing, and working
with data
as easy as blogging

8. Publishing data
Anthony has some spatial data and wants to
display it as part of a blog post.

9. Publishing data
Anthony uploads it to a public SDI, styles it,
provides a background, and then puts a map
widget on his blog.

10. Publishing data
Meanwhile, the data, style, and map remain
available on the public SDI
for others to use.

11. Metadata and reputation
The World Organization tells Cameron, their
consultant, to put data she has gathered on their
SDI.

12. Metadata and reputation
Other users notice mistakes in the metadata.
They notify Cameron and give it a low rating.

13. Metadata and reputation
Cameron fixes the mistakes, and the other users
rate the data more highly. Her reputation on the
SDI improves.

14. Federated search
A regional Health agency and a regional Transit
agency have separate SDI systems.

15. Federated search
Tom, a GIS analyst doing research, seeks out
correlations between health and bicycle routes

16. Federated search
Tom searches for data in a single federated index
and downloads the data as a batch.

17. What is GeoNode?
GeoNode is a spatial data infrastructure
It focuses on data, then users, then metadata.
Data upload, sharing, cartography, user profiles, dynamic metadata
generation, and more.

18. What is GeoNode?
GeoNode builds on open source geospatial projects like
GeoExt, OpenLayers, GeoWebCache
GeoServer, GeoNetwork, and PostGIS
with application functionality built on Django.

19. GeoNode Vision
⇒
GeoNode Involvement
⇒
GeoNode Community

20. GeoNode Vision
⇒
GeoNode Involvement
⇒
GeoNode Community
How did this happen?

21. Can the lessons learned can
help other ICTD projects?
A case study GeoNode
sheds light on international disaster
reduction efforts.

22. Disaster Risk Modeling 101
Risk
• Used for (busted stuff)
determining =
development
Hazard
investments (boom)
• Once were a mess x
• Now standardizing: Exposure
(stuff)
x
Vulnerability
(bust per boom)

23. GeoNode History
The World Bank had a problem:
Disaster risk modeling requires lots of data
Central American Probabilistic Risk Assessment (CAPRA) initiative
needed participating agencies across various governments to share
data
Top-down approaches didn't work
Needed to work bottom-up

24. GeoNode History
The World Bank had a problem:
Costly proprietary GIS solutions are a burden to developing nations
The Bank wanted to build local capacity around financially
sustainable software
Smart folks within the Bank turned to open source geospatial
software

25. GeoNode Vision
OpenGeo had an idea for a solution:
The Bank provided the perfect use case for OpenGeo's vision for open
source architectures of participation in geospatial
Providing freely available web-based tools could be a great way to
collect and share data.
GeoNode was born.

26. GeoNode Involvement
Traditional SDIs have typically been designed by 'experts' with
abstract needs in mind—hence a focus on metadata.
GeoNode is being designed in response to the needs and
concerns of institutional partners as they implement real-world
projects—hence a focus on data and users.

27. Metadata Pain
Good metadata for geospatial data is
important but hard to produce.

28.  GeoNode has user profiles and features them
prominently
 Those profiles have ISO metadata fields within
them

29. Metadata Made Easy

30. Metadata Published
Metadata is published
with open standard
CSW
using GeoNetwork

31. Open Data Skepticism
Isn't GeoNode an open data platform?
Doesn't open data raise concerns about
data quality and data security?

32. Open Data Optimism
Yes, GeoNode is designed to promote open
data.

33. Open Data Optimism
Features like
User reputation
Organizational endorsement
Flexible security
address data quality concerns

34. Open Data Optimism
GeoNode supports
the continuum
of openness with a common platform
for institutional GIS and neogeography

35. GeoNode Involvement
GeoNode seeks to unify data management across
organizations.
Thus many different organizations have reason to get involved.
The opportunity and challenge is effective collaboration.

36. GeoNode Involvement
As more organizations got involved, development had to
decentralize.
Not just a single team within OpenGeo, but a larger community

37. How do we continue growth when
vision and development are decentralized?

38. How do we continue growth when
vision and development are decentralized?

39. That's what
open source communities
are for.

40. But how do we get institutions to get their employees
to participate in the open community?
Need to align broader visions, including...

41. Disaster Reduction
• Australia-Indonesia Facility for Disaster Reduction
• Geoscience Australia
• Global Earthquake Model
• Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction
• Secretariat of the Pacific
are mapping infrastructure in developing nations, performing
disaster modelling, etc. using GeoNode.

44. Academic
MapStor Foundation and Harvard's WorldMap seek to collect and
share data across disciplines and institutions using GeoNode.

46. Spatial Marketplaces
The Australia–New Zealand Spatial Marketplace seeks to increase
data availability in the South Pacific by creating an online
marketplace built on GeoNode and open to all.

47. Community
The World Bank's vision was the
collaboration of many institutions and governments
around common goals of data management

48. Community
As a result,
many organizations are involved
in building and extending GeoNode

49. Community
How can we keep these efforts coherent, not divergent?
Efficient, not redundant?

50. Community
GeoNode's development requires
many visions to be aligned.

51. OpenGeo
• Benefits from contributions back to core software
• Has led effort to coordinate between institutions
o easier management and development
o stronger open source communities

52. Our task has been to
scale up open source development
practices to large institutions

53. Roadmapping Summit May 2011
• Explicit transition to open source community model
o Established a proper Project Steering Committee
o Passed policies for contributions and code review
• Official decentralization from OpenGeo's core team
• Identified common development goals

54. How to discover common development goals?

56. We
collected
individual organization's roadmaps

57. We
standardized
individual organization's roadmaps

58. Participants shared their visions with each other,
explored the roadmap,
and contributed new items that were missing.

60. We
identified
a common roadmap

62. Then we collectively
prioritized
those roadmap items.

63. Which do we build first?

64. Outcomes
• "Rock Solid" 1.1
• People entered the summit to big ideas to impress their
bosses
• People left having committed resources to docs, bug
fixes, and other work necessary to keep the project
running.

65. Outcomes
• Framework for future improvements
• We have principled roadmap for the software with real
institutional backing
• We know who to call when we have the resources

66. Outcomes
• Community solidarity
• “From man’s sweat and God’s love,
beer came into the world”
— St. Arnold

67. Remaining challenges
for OpenGeo
Achieving open source best practices
while being a primary contractor.

68. Remaining challenges
Maintaining consensus among large organizations
despite natural tensions and turnover.

69. Remaining challenges
As the process decentralizes, who is responsible
for the hard work of this coordination?

70. Remaining (technical) challenges
Can the GeoNode community develop
technology that works in regions
with low connectivity?

71. Remaining (technical) challenges
Is the dream of a
secure federated data network
(both spatial and social)
realistic?
This ties into questions of federated social networking.

72. Remaining (research) challenges
This perspective on GeoNode is from
offices in New York City and Washington, DC
What does it look like in the countries
where it is being deployed

73. Remaining (research) challenges
Is the open source model
living up to its development goals?

74. Thank you.
Any questions?