Yesterday evening, I had the pleasure of participating in a panel discussion on Clubhouse, hosted by Todd Barr and Jordan Cullen, and including Will Cadell of SparkGeo. Clubhouse seems to be a really convenient venue for setting up such a forum with low barriers to entry, so that was enjoyable. The topic of the discussion was “Geospatial ROI” and we talked about various ways to articulate the value of geospatial (the data and the concept) and GIS (the toolset to exploit geospatial).
One topic that we didn’t have time to get to, but has been at the front of my mind for a while is the “return on non-investment” with regard to open-source tools, geospatial or otherwise. Open-source has been mainstream for quite some time and platforms like Github make it easier to publish, manage, and maintain open-source tools. As a result, it’s easier than it’s ever been to find and use open-source tools to solve your problem.