Digifesto

It looks like OpenGeo is going to be getting a lot of business in the coming year for GeoNode–so much that we can’t handle it with the size of our current team.

So we’re hiring a new Software Engineer.

What we’re looking for is somebody who has both the engineering chops to handle our complex stack (which includes Django, GeoServer, GeoNetwork, and GeoExt) and the inclination and aptitude to provide on-site consulting, training, and support to clients. Because of our partnership with the World Bank, many of these deployments will be around the world. So this job will likely offer the opportunity to go interesting places and meet interesting people, on top of coding for a very well poised open source, open data project.

OpenGeo, I have to say, is a kickass place to work. I’ve been working for it and our parent organization OpenPlans for almost three years now, and I am challenged and inspired daily by the intelligence of the people around me and the dynamism of the organization. It’s also committed to openness with a sincerity that is extraordinarily compelling to the right kind of person.

This blog post, for example, divulges crucial information about our business strategy in an unprofessional medium. “What is going on?” you might ask. “Why is he doing this? Is it a corporate ploy?” No. Our business strategy isn’t a secret. On the contrary, we want as many people to know about it as possible so that more people will get involved in our open source projects and communities. And though our work and life itself demands humility, on rare occasions (just as when we are trying to attract applications from Software Engineers) we get to brag about how great we are.

Something else I like about us? We are scrappy. OpenPlans has subsisted primarily on donations from Mark Gorton for most of its existence. We are in a turbulent time, because the LimeWire lawsuits mean that we can no longer depend on Mark. But seriously in the nick of time, we warming up our business development machines.

The leads are coming in, and we are growing (did I mention that we are hiring?). It feels like the helicopter is lifting off just as the ground beneath us is melting into hot lava. And yet, we aren’t afraid. Yesterday I saw Vanessa Hamer give a budget report for OpenPlans. The gist of it was: even assuming that lots of things go wrong with our funding pipeline, we are well prepared to thrive in the future. I have never had more confidence in this organization than I do now.

This is a great thing. It is great because OpenPlans and OpenGeo are working on great things. OpenGeo in particular is in the early stages of transforming the geospatial software industry from one dominated by proprietary desktop software to free web software. It is providing tools that will help institutions transform their closed and cobwebby data silos to nodes in a vibrant, open geospatial web. For great justice.

“Are you for real?” Yes, I’m for real. OpenGeo is that good. I know we’re that good because we have attracted successful geospatial software industry entrepreneurs (1) (2) (3) as our upper level management in the past year. These folks aren’t just all geniuses. They are geniuses with domain expertise who are passionately dedicated to transforming an industry with an impact on millions of people.

We also have some great connections going on. I believe I’ve mentioned that we’ve been working with the World Bank’s CAPRA initiative on this GeoNode project (the one we are hiring for). The people behind CAPRA are rockstars within a superorganization with a mission to save Central America from natural disasters.

Oh, and we’re going to be working with the Global Earthquake Model soon. Those guys are a crack team of brilliant scientists with a mandate to unite all earthquake modeling under one banner using open source software. If it works, it will have an impact on everyone who is in an area that suffers earthquake risk, because earthquake modeling is used by everyone from humanitarian NGO’s who do disaster relief to insurance companies who wind up taking on a lot of the corporate/economic risk of natural disasters. It’s a mandate that would be ludicrously ambitious if it weren’t happening right now with web technology that has just recently been perfected and available.

It is so fucking cool I can hardly contain myself. I have to suppress these thoughts normally so I don’t get so distracted by how cool it is that I don’t get any work done. It is so cool that it’s hard to talk about publicly because it all just seems so unbelievable.

That is what we are hiring for right now.

We’ve made great strides in GeoNode development in the past few weeks, due in part to the addition of Luke Tucker, on loan from Civic Works, to the team.

The main improvements lately have been ones slated for the 0.1.2 milestone, which focuses on basic data management through the web application interface.

The most important improvement is the data upload functionality. We provide a web interface for SHP and TIFF upload and then push the file to GeoServer using its REST configuration API and gsconfig.py. The layer is then exposed via OCG services like any normal GeoServer layer, and so is available for use by OpenLayers and GeoExt applications, for example.

Hat tip to GeoCommons for inspiring the UI for uploading the multiple files needed for Shapefile data.

You can get a taste of some of the other improvements by checking out the Data and Map information pages. In GeoNode, both data sets and maps (compilations of data, with a layer order and styles specified) are first-class content. We want to let users transition seamlessly between working with data and working with maps in order to smooth out the web GIS experience.

The “information pages” (I think we are looking for a better name for these, internally) serve as dashboards to a particular data set or map, and expose the relationships internal to the content. By viewing which maps a data set is a part of, the user can find out about who trusts the data, who finds it authoritative. This is just the first of many ways we plan to let social use of data provide relevant metadata.

I’m going to start blogging here about the GeoNode.

If there is anything I’ve learned at The Open Planning Project and OpenGeo, it’s that it is critical for the success of open source projects that they be “truly open”–not just with an open source license “slapped on,” but with a transparency built into its development and management process.

So I am chagrined that the GeoNode, the project I’m currently most involved with, has been developed in relative obscurity. At OpenGeo, we’ve been treating it like an internal project, and though its task tracker is open, documentation is sparse.

The reason for this is simple: we have been too busy building it to properly groom it. But hopefully that will change soon.

So what is the GeoNode? Here’s the backstory, as articulated by Eddie Pickle:

The GeoNode project is an open source initiative backed by the World Bank, OpenGeo, and others with pilot programs in El Salvador and Guatemala. It aims to give a modern spin to the idea of the spatial data infrastructure with an eye to the use and reuse of data, encouraging collaboration, and promoting open data exchange as a default. Initially, the development of the GeoNode has focused on serving and visualizing the data created by the Central America Probabilistic Risk Assessment (CAPRA) to assess and mitigate the risk due to adverse Natural Disasters.

At its core, the GeoNode is based on open source components GeoServer, GeoNetwork, Django, and GeoExt that provide a platform for sophisticated web browser spatial visualization and analysis. Atop this stack, the project has built a map composer and viewer, tools for analysis, and reporting tools. The GeoNode also supports facilities for styling data as well as collaborative features like ratings, comments, and tagging for data, maps, and styles. The GeoNode is built on four key tenets: Collaboration, Distribution, Cartography and Data collection.

This is the GeoNode vision–a vision which is current under (rapid!) development. But at the time of this writing, the use of the present tense in the paragraphs above is sometimes ambitious. You can check out the demo that we update weekly from GeoNode trunk here.

In its current state, it requires some explanation. What you’re seeing is a Django site that is configured to work against a GeoServer instance that contains the spatial data hosted by the GeoNode. The map on the front page is a GeoExt map embedded as a widget. This Map-As-Embeddable-Widget is a feature of the GeoNode’s Map Composer, which is closely related to GeoExplorer, OpenGeo’s main GeoExt-based web GIS client.

The site’s theming is, as requested by our partner and client, made to look like the World Bank’s CAPRA website. Rolando Penate has been working ideas for generic GeoNode themes that we hope to implement soon. His design wireframes show off some of the potential of these themes as well as the features that we are scheduled to implement in the coming year: user registration, commenting and rating, a groups.

The purpose of all these “Web 2.0” features (cringe!) is to provide a layer of social metadata over the geospatial data and ISO metadata that we will be supporting with an integrated GeoNetwork instance. If the internet has proved anything, it’s that the best catalogs are those created dynamically from real usage. So our plan is to integrate cutting-edge web GIS tools with the social features of the site so that as users participate in the GeoNode environment, we collect data about their activity and use it to refine search results. We joke about whether the GeoNode aims to be the MediaWiki/Twitter of maps, or the Facebook/YouTube of maps, or the Yelp/Wordpress of maps…but really these features are all so commonplace on the web now that it’s not a matter of imitating the market leaders. It’s a matter of taking solid modern principles of data management and bringing them intelligently to the Spatial Data Infrastructure domain.

We are several months away from these features, however. For now we are focusing on building a solid backbone of tools that will make the GeoNode attractive to users.

If you’ve been following GeoExt development lately, you may have noticed Andreas Hocevar’s contributions of JavaScript client code that works against the Mapfish Printing module. That’s all been core development work funded by our GeoNode partnership.

Another neat budding project worth noting is gsconfig.py, developed primarily by David Winslow. It’s a Python library for interacting with GeoServer’s catalog via its REST API. We are going to be using it to provide through-the-web data upload and metadata management through a Django-powered user interface.

These two open source contributions highlight what’s for me one of the coolest parts of our GeoNode development: that we are dedicated to bringing as much as possible of the work for the GeoNode back into widely recognized open source geospatial projects or splitting parts out into general purpose libraries. This is possible because of the NGO and government community partnership around the GeoNode that is being spearheaded by Stu Gill, of World Bank CAPRA. Stu is a visionary who sees very clearly the decisive role openness will play in the future of SDI, GIS, etc. And he understands that openness will play an important role all the way down to the open source core, and has been reaching out to like minds.

OpenGeo’s GeoNode team has been hard at work on the prototype GeoNode software and the open source software improvements that it depends on, but in the coming months we hope to shift our priorities more towards documentation and community. We’ll be announcing those advances through GeoNode.org, the official site of the GeoNode project. But we’ve unintentionally left the lid on this for too long. In the short term, I’ll be blogging informally about GeoNode progress week-by-week here, because it’s high time we got the GeoNode into the open.