I’m really excited to report that Azavea will be both sponsoring and participating in the OSGeo Code Sprint again this year.  David Zwarg and Jeff Adams will be joining a couple of dozen other developers in Montreal for four days to work on improvements in several open source geospatial software projects.  David and Jeff will be working on improving the PostGIS spatial data extension of the PostgreSQL database.

Azavea’s relationship to open source software is a complicated one.  We use a variety of open source software in doing our development work. We use programmer tools such as NUnit and JUnit for writing unit tests, Subversion and Git source control, the Apache web server, the Concrete5 content management system, the Firefox browser and the Linux operating system. Furthermore, we sometimes use some open source GIS software such as GDAL, PostGIS and OpenLayers, and our commitment to this code sprint is based on helping develop these tools.

Azavea also distributes some of its own software under open source licenses (see FastDAO, District Builder and Oatmeal Geocoder), but we also distribute software that is proprietary and closed source (see HunchLab, Sajara and Cicero). And we are active users of the Esri ArcGIS platform.  Most of our clients use ArcGIS, and it is, by far, the most capable, integrated and full-featured geospatial data management and analysis software on the market, with offerings from cell phones to enterprise and cloud servers.  I also think that open source projects like OpenLayers and PostGIS are an important part of a diverse software ecosystem, and I think that hybrid systems that are made up of many components are becoming more common.  We have made multiple contributions to the OpenLayers project, and most of them have focused on adding better support for ArcGIS services and tools. In other words, like many software companies, we make strategic decisions about what tools we use as well as how we distribute our own work.

A healthy commercial software market has room for many business models. I see the various open source geospatial projects as part of a larger community of people working on improving tools that apply geospatial science and knowledge. By participating in the OSGeo Code Sprint, David and Jeff will learn a lot. The PostGIS software will be improved through their contribution. And they will enjoy the thrill of contributing to a larger community. It’s important to remember that when a community works well, we can frequently accomplish more within that community than we can as individuals.

Seven of us came together to create a web-based visualization and display tool based on data from the New Jersey Gang Survey 2007. The NJ State Police have been conducting these surveys every three years since 2001. Using Django, MySQL, OpenLayers, OpenStreetMap and ArcGIS Desktop, we put together a full-blown app in two days. Two analysts from the New Jersey State Police joined us on Saturday, explained the background on the data set, wrote up the text and other content for the site and answered questions on how the data was structured.

New Jersey Gang Survey Viewer

The result is The New Jersey Gang Survey Viewer. Check it out. I was amazed by how much a small group could accomplish in such a short time frame, particularly when most of the participants neither knew each other nor knew many of the technology tools when they started. The players were:

• Dean Baratta, New Jersey State Police
• Nick Cazoneri, Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission
• Robert Cheetham, Azavea
• Don Coleman, Chariot Solutions
• Peter Lynch, New Jersey State Police
• David Middlecamp, Azavea
• Josh Tauberer, Civic Impulse