I could quibble. For example, there are no tiles for the highest zoom levels, and that just seems like a sad omission. Nonetheless, there’s global coverage and it’s a major vote of support for OSM.  BTW, I also think the design of the new ArcGIS.com web site represents a vast improvement overt the ArcGIS Online system.  It’s got a straightforward user interface and muted style that’s easy on the eye.

B what? you might ask!

Last spring Azavea joined a regional organization called the Sustainable Business Network (SBN) of Greater Philadelphia.  Originally founded by Judy Wicks of the White Dog Cafe, SBN is now part of a national network of private, independent, locally owned businesses that operate in support of a “triple bottom line“.  The triple bottom line extends the measurement of business success from the usual bottom line (profits) to “people, planet and profit” and is based on the idea that companies should consider environmental and social impact as well as the usual profit motive.  While the idea was originally developed by a UK management consultant, John Elkington, it has spread to many parts of the world.

As part of joining SBN, we filled out an extensive survey created by an organization called B Lab.  B Lab (also based in the Philadelphia region though it operates nationally) was created to promote the designation of a new corporate form, the “B Corporation“.  Under current IRS regulations, there are several types of private for-profit businesses including C Corporations, S Corporations, LLC’s, LLP’s, partnerships and sole proprietors.  Azavea is an S Corporation (which is a C Corporation that elects a special status under Subchapter S of the IRS code).  The B Corporation status represents a new type or for-profit company that uses the power of businesses operating in a market-based economy to solve social and ecosystem problems. B Lab is working with state legislatures to try to have the B Corporation status added as a new corporate form in each state.

Azavea joins other leading B Corp companies

So you might be thinking that all of that Corporate Social Responsibility (or “CSR”, to those in the know) stuff sounds good, but it’s actually kind of hard to measure.  How can they separate the green-washing from the sincere operations?  So B Lab has developed a survey that attempts to capture the business practices of an organization and score them.  Companies that score high enough can become certified as B Corporations.  And they don’t just take your word for it, they audit the firm’s statements to ensure the integrity of the results.

But it’s not all. To become certified, B Corporations must meet comprehensive and transparent social and environmental performance standards, and amend their corporate by-laws to incorporate the interests of employees, community, and the environment. They also agree to contribute a portion of their revenue (based on the company’s size) each year to B Lab to support the program, and to undergo an audit of their business practices once every 2 years to ensure that their business practices continue to align with the B Corporation’s principles.

You might now wonder why Azavea would qualify.  The B Corporation status emphasizes the triple bottom line of social responsibility, sustainability and profitability (people, planet, profit).  At Azavea, many of our business decisions stem from these three principles.

We were founded in 2000 with the vision to build innovative location-based web and mobile solutions and perform spatial analysis for clients committed to making positive and enduring impacts in the communities they serve. We have worked with numerous non-profit, academic and government clients to answer complex geospatial questions in a wide variety of domains including natural resource planning, neighborhood revitalization, economic development, crime analysis, real estate property analysis, redistricting, political advocacy, and cultural resources.

But most of our B Corporation points came from our management and employment practices, including:

• Financial transparency – we open the books to all of our full-time staff
• We hold at least two meetings per year to report to employees on company performance
• 100% health care, prescriptions and dental care.  For care that’s not covered by our health plan, we offer up to $2,000 per year in medical reimbursements
• Public Transit and biking cost reimbursement plans
• Paid time off for voting
• Paid maternity and paternity leave
• Retirement plan with company match
• Profit sharing plan
• Domestic partner benefits
• 3 weeks vacation plus additional sick time
• Training and professional development opportunities
• Reimbursement for continuing education expenses
• Part-time / flex time schedules available
• Portion of profits go to charitable organizations
• Mission statement that incorporates social value and employee interests

Moreover, our 10% personal research and pro bono programs have enabled staff members to spend some time working on projects that are not focused on the immediate needs of a particular client, while at the same time enabling the company to expand its skill sets and broaden its business opportunities in areas and domains not explored before. These programs have been at the source of projects such as Walkshed (to calculate and map walkability), BusMinder (a real-time bus notification application), a white paper on Gerrymandering, geographic service maps for MANNA, and the Haitian Earthquake Registry, to name a few.

The same service-oriented attitude extends to Azavea’s commitment to redistributing a minimum of 2% of our annual profits to charitable organizations selected by staff through the company’s “Time to Give Back” program.

But we’re not resting on our laurels! In addition to the business benefits, the B Lab survey also highlighted some areas where we can improve.  Here are some of the ideas:

• Establish a Board of Advisers made up people independent of the company
• Develop an environmental policy
• Conduct environmental review / audit and share with staff and customers
• Measure our annual energy consumption and use it to develop metrics by which we can reduce it

We are proud of our new corporate status and look forward to implementing some of the above ideas in our business practices.

ESRI has a perception problem. It is similar to the one that Microsoft and other commercial software firms have developed vis-a-vis open source software projects. ESRI is perceived by many in the open source world as being opposed to open source software. While I think ESRI has fed this perception to some extent, the open source community has also cultivated a “David vs. Goliath” approach that encourages an adversarial relationship with the larger software companies that I don’t think it terribly helpful either.

But as Paul Ramsey recently pointed out in his address at the FOSS4G 2009 conference in Sydney, most of the mainstream commercial software firms now support open source software platforms, melding commercial and open source business models. Commercial software firms contribute to open source projects for a myriad of reasons including:

• As a critical component of their platform
• Low cost R&D
• Build a broad constituency for a standard
• Increase the number of developers focused on a particular platform
• Retire a platform while still enabling customers to receive support

ESRI has pursued at least three of these approaches in its work with open source projects, and while projecting a competitive attitude about some open source projects (and justifiably so), they also deserve some credit for supporting open source projects in a variety of areas including:

• Using and supporting GDAL raster I/O in ArcGIS
• Using Python for Geoprocessing
• Integration of the R Project in ArcGIS 10
• Founding contributor to 52 North around OGC Sensor Web Enablement

ESRI also gave us an open specification on the now venerable shapefile and looks set to do the same (after some years of delay) for the File Geodatabase. And ESRI has contributed resources to development as well as platform support for many of the OGC standards. I would also argue that many of the most successful open source projects could not exist without substantial support from commercial software companies.  PostGIS would not have got off the ground without early and ongoing support from Refractions. Apache and many Java projects gained from substantial investments by IBM.  In other words, I don’t think we gain by having open source software seen as being in opposition to commercial software.  It’s simply part of a complex software development ecosystem.

But I opened by saying that ESRI has a perception problem. In addition to continuing to support select open source projects when it makes strategic sense, I’d like to make a pitch for ESRI supporting the OpenStreetMap project. OpenStreetMap is really multiple projects. It does include open source (GPL) software that would probably be of limited interest to ESRI, but it’s primary output is an open map of the planet. Just as ESRI has helped to encourage the broad use of free government data sets like the Census TIGER and USGS data sets, it should help promote the OpenStreetMap effort.

Why support it?

• More data means more use of GIS: In the same way that free distribution of TIGER, USGS, Dept of Defense and other data sets catalyzed GIS development in the 1980’s and 1990’s, more data in more parts of the world will encourage more sophisticated uses of GIS, where ESRI really shines.
• PR value: Support for the OpenStreetMap project will give ESRI some of the street cred that companies like AutoDesk have gained by contributing software projects to the open source community.
• Free data for ArcGIS Online: The OpenStreetMap data set offers a free, global data set with distinctive cartography that covers some parts of the world even better than the commercial providers. Providing an OSM map service to ArcGIS Online will only make it more attractive for ESRI’s customers.

How should it be supported?

• ArcGIS Desktop: Enable ArcMap to both display data from OSM and be an editor. The ESRI desktop GIS community are some of the most skilled and knowledgeable people engaged with map production. By enabling them to use the software tools with which they are already familiar (rather than the capable, but clunkier tools like Mercartor and JOSM), they will be able to make valuable contributions to OSM that will make the map better in every part of the world.
• Toolboxes: Create tools that convert OSM data formats to feature classes.
• ArcGIS Online: Provide an OSM-based map tile set.

The OSM project is not public domain, so there are important license considerations, but even with the currently proposed revisions, it’s a pretty open license with only attribution and share-alike provisions limiting its use.  But as the Haiti earthquake response demonstrated, OSM is an important and evolving piece of infrastructure that will only be better with ESRI’s support.

——–

UPDATE: 3/22/2010

I should have also cited a recent ESRI blog on some techniques for incorporating OpenStreetMap into ArcGIS Server that are possible now.  These include:

• Use the WMS extension
• Use the Data Interoperability Extension (a nice package from Safe Software that is an extension for both the ArcGIS desktop and ArcGIS Server) which now support the OSM XML file directly.  Export the data from OSM to shapefiles or a geodatabase and serve it up.
• You can also use an extension Azavea (that’s us) created for the ArcGIS Flex API that supports direct integration of the OSM tile structure for Flex apps.

• Elected Officials lookups – enter an address and find your representatives as well as a list of their top contributors [we’re excited that this lookup service is powered by our Cicero API
• Campaign Contribution database
• Election Reform advocacy – including redistricting, campaign finance and ethics
• Open Government and Transparency advocacy
• City and State Government watchdog – with a diminished print media, there is an increasing need for other organizations to supplement the normal role of newspapers

Over the next year, Common Cause/PA hopes to add additional information for Pittsburgh as well as extend the contribution databases as well as its ability to report on government activities.

So we resolved to set up a shared calendar as a mechanism for collectively tracking all of these deadlines and activities.  We had  switched our e-mail system to GoogleApps Premium in early 2008.  When we did this, we gained a number of capabilities in addition to e-mail including: shared calendars, document authoring/storage and customizable home pages for each staff person.  So our starting point was to create a Google Calendar for the marketing folks to share.  However, many of the marketing and business development activities span several days, and while Google Calendar is a great way to enter and store events, the usual daily/weekly/monthly calendar layout does not make it easy to see several weeks or months together.  We were really looking for a ‘timeline’ display of the calendar so we would be able to see the juxtaposition of several events and their relationship to each other.  So we looked around for a low-cost system that would enable us to both enter our marketing activities and visualize them in a timeline layout.  We looked at online project management tools, some of which support Gantt charts, but while a Gantt chart is great for decomposing tasks into subtasks, it arranges each task into it’s own line.  So if you have 20 tasks, that’s ok, but if you have 100 or 200 spread out over a year, it’s not very readable – the chart just keeps growing vertically.

So we decided to build something in-house.  When we had first set up our wiki, David Zwarg had showed off a tool called Simile Timeline, created by some folks at MIT.  So we went back to that project and learned that not only had it continued to develop but it was available as an open source toolkit that could be used in a broad range of applications.  David picked up Simile and within a couple of days, he had mashed up 6 calendars within the account we’d set up for the marketing crew into a timeline-based calendar.  He also experimented with incorporating a map, but we decided it consumed too much screen real estate and nixed it.  After all, we’re still small enough that we generally know what part of the country every is in.

While geography proved to not be very compelling for this application, the juxtaposition of space and time can be a very useful visualization.  Below are a couple of screenshots from one of the recent builds of of our HunchLab product (it’s used for forecasting and geographic change detection), where there’s a critical need to view both spatial and temporal patterns in the same view.

Figure 1: The points on the map represent the span of time selected on the graph with a heat map of the points.

Figure 2: The graph below the map is a Time-of-Day/Day-of-Week graph, showing a "temporal heat map" of when the events in the map occurred.

OSM at the time of the quake

OSM after a couple of days

OSM, after quake, zoomed in

Sean Wohltman made some interesting observations, however, that Google’s similar MapMaker effort was working at cross-purposes to the OSM efforts, leaving users of the maps needing to make a decision about which version they should use.  A common effort would benefit more people, but the legal terms and conditions prevent a straightforward resolution.  Geospatial data developers and users have made great contributions to the Haiti relief efforts, but while the geo-geeks are playing a leadership role in one respect, they are also exposing some tough contradictions in our legal infrastructure.

Update 1/18/2010:

Some additional OSM Resources related to the Haiti quake:

• Full list of OSM resources including: regular extract jobs, printable and static maps, alternative renderers and other services.
• Dedicated map of Port-au-Prince with several up-to-date aerial and satellite photos, collapsed buildings, camps and obstacles.  Hosted by folks at Oxilian.nl

OSM Haiti with Mapnik rendering and earthquake related locations

The Google.org folks write:

What if we could offer scientists and tropical nations access to a high-performance satellite imagery-processing engine running online, in the “Google cloud”? And what if we could gather together all of the earth’s raw satellite imagery data — petabytes of historical, present and future data — and make it easily available on this platform? We decided to find out, by working with Greg and Carlos to re-implement their software online, on top of a prototype platform we’ve built that gives them easy access to terabytes of satellite imagery and thousands of computers in our data centers.

Geoprocessing in the cloud with petabytes of satellite imagery while reducing computation from days to seconds.  That’s a compelling vision. The prototype, Earth Engine, is not yet available to the public, but  Google has pledged to make it accessible for free to any tropical country.  And while the initial target of this effort is deforestation, it seems only logical that the Earth Engine could very well be extended to cover other types of geoprocessing.

Distributing geoprocessing has been on its way for a while. Wolfram Research has been offering the server version of its Mathematica product as a way to distribute mathematical and statistical processing across many machines in a network. Brian Flood has done a fair amount of work on cloud-based geoprocessing with his Arc2Earth Cloud Services.  At Azavea, we’ve designed our own DecisionTree raster processing framework to both distribute work across multiple machines/processors/cores as well as be able to run in the Amazon Web Services EC2 environment. Each of these examples is aiming at several benefits:

• Speed: desktop processing can take many minutes and even hours to complete.  By distributing the work across dozens or hundreds of machines, we can get responses that are fast enough to display the results in “web time” – a second or two.
• Lower Cost: If we can acquire processing power as we need it, rather than buying and maintaining hardware and disks ourselves, we can lower the cost of computing substantially.
• Simpler UI: By complex processing to be performed on the web, we can create crafted user interfaces that focus on the needs of a particular workflow rather than requiring that someone learn the far more complex tools in a Desktop GIS.

I’m pretty excited the prospects for bringing analytical and statistical services to a much larger audience via cloud services.

This is still a fairly limited capability, with only bounding box (rectangle) and point-plus-radius (circle) searches currently supported.  However, the ability to sort based on distance in combination with the spatial data services would be enough for many of the most straightforward mapping applications.

Over the past year, David Zwarg has been devoting his 10% research time to supporting the mapping components on the SourceMap project at the MIT Media Lab.  He had a chance to present at the Boston Ignite Spatial a couple of weeks ago.  Check out his presentation on this video.

Whether for commercial software or open source projects, the crafting of a license is one of the most important decisions a company or team can make.  The license determines who can use the software, how it can be used as well as how it can be shared.  Open data projects, while different from open source software, face the same types of questions.

OpenStreetMap is probably the single largest and most significant open data project in the geospatial realm.  The project was started because “most maps you think of as free actually have legal or technical restrictions on their use, holding back people from using them in creative, productive, or unexpected ways.” Up until now, OSM has been using a license called Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike (CC-BY-SA).  However, OpenStreetMap is more like a database than it is like a text document or photograph and database projects have run into some specific problems with the CC family of licenses.  The OpenStreetMap project is proposing a move to the Open Database License (ODbL).  Like many collaborative projects, the move is being made by submitting the change and the justification for it to the community for review, comment and vote.

Why make this move?  What’s wrong with the CCBYSA license? A lot of people use the CC licenses to publish their articles, photos, paintings and other creative work.  But the various forms of the Creative Commons licenses are designed to work within the legal infrastructure the surrounds the concept of copyright.  Structured databases are collections of facts.  When factual data (like streets drawn on a map) are arranged the way you’d expect it to be, it’s not necessarily protected by copyright law, particularly under U.S. copyright law, which only protects works that arise from creativity.  If copyright doesn’t apply to factual data and the CC licenses are based on copyright law, we have a problem.  The is the core of the issue.  Even the Creative Commons folks have said that the CCBYSA license should not be applied to databases.

The new proposal, ODbL, resolves the issues by applying copyright where it applies and applying contract law where it does not.  It attempts to take the best of both worlds and create a happy medium that applies to database projects like OSM. As perhaps the largest open database in the world, OSM was one of the touchstone cases that the Open Data Commons and Open Knowledge Foundation used to build the license.

But it’s also interesting to note what it won’t cover.  The ODbL will only apply to distribution of the OSM database.  Contributions to OSM (like GPX tracks and other database edits) are covered by a Contributor Agreement which will refer to the ODbL as the means of distributing their contributions.  It won’t cover image tiles generated based on the OSM database.  It won’t cover the OSM wiki, which, since it is text and therefore considered a creative work, will remain covered by CCBYSA.  And it won’t cover the software source code used to run the entire OSM system – that will be usually, but not always, be covered by the GPL.

There remains some controversy within the OSM community. Many members, including one of the founders advocating for the change, feel that a completely free, Public Domain license (no limits on usage) would be preferable.  The ODbL will retain the “share-alike” concept of the current CCBYSA license (requiring both attribution and that changes be submitted back to the community and distribution carry the same terms). They feel that the spirit of reciprocity codified in this approach is stronger. The new OSM license will include both the concept of attribution and share-alike because many members of the community feel that this limitation benefits the project.  Nonetheless, others feel strongly that a truly public domain situation would be better in the long run, encouraging broad usage without consideration for consequences.  In the best democratic tradition, however, both sides express their positions in Vote Yes and Vote No pages.  Check them out.  And if you are an active member of the OSM Foundation, make sure you cast your vote.

You may be tempted to file this under “boring”, but the nuances of licenses are an important part of the creative economy in which we operate.  They set the terms under which we interact with each others work.