[OSGeo-Discuss] How to quantify the economic impact of OSGeo software? Your help needed for a research article

Thu Jun 4 06:44:19 PDT 2015

First of all my big thank you to Doug ,Randal, Jeff,Vaclav,Patrick, Phillip, Johan for all your important inputs. This has provided lot of dimensions to explore for our research paper.

Randal - your example was a real eye opener of the long term costs/sustainability issues of properitory software in education. The example you mentioned of one high school where after two years  the computers are still in good shape BUT they will not  run ArcGISPro which is the new release from ESRI.  Luckily for that school, they had a great volunteer like you to help them with installing FOSS4G . But there will be many schools who might not even have any help or volunteers to help them in similar situvation. So it is not a local problem but a global geoeducation problem.

Also is there any guarentee that the properitory vendor will keep providing free software for the long term? They can change thier mind any time and the poor schools ,teachers and students will be left on thier own. Either they have to pay and buy  (maybe they will get some discount) but the fact of the matter is they are at the mercy of the vendor. If the properitory vendor decides to change the costs, the schools will suffer. 

Vaclav - your point on overestimation of "gift" is important  http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/ica-osgeo-labs/2015-June/001702.html   . As we are writing a scientific paper we cannot base our work on assumptions and hence we need to find exactly how AAG calculated this 1 Billion USD gift  

I will email AAG to request if this formula they have used for this 1 Billion USD calculation can be made available. We will be very grateful if they can share this info and we will gratefully acknowledge thier help.

Doug - the example i gave of GeoAcademy (just one institute who are running a GIS program based on OSGeo software) is just a tiny fraction of OSGeo software being used in universities and educational institutes worldwide. But i got your point. If we can get the correct formula from ESRI or AAG colleagues, we can use this same formula to estimate the donation of OSGeo software to global geoeducation efforts. We will be doing a survey to help us get an idea of the scale of this as a start and refine it based on feedbacks. 

Johan - your point on creating economic surplus is important http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/2015-June/014303.html  I think another big economic impact of OSGeo is the value provided to business worldwide to expand the geospatial and digital economy ( otherwise these companies would have to buy expensive properitory licences ) . The economic opportunities that is created by thousands of small and medium organisations who are using OSGeo software for thier business need to be studied. In fact, we will be happy if anyone with Economics background in this area could help us and be co-author of this publication. 

Thanks again for all of you who have helped for this. If there are other ideas/perspectives do let us know.

Best wishes,

Suchith
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From: discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org [discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Randal Hale [rjhale at northrivergeographic.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 02, 2015 1:55 PM
To: discuss at lists.osgeo.org; ica-osgeo-labs at lists.osgeo.org; southeast-us at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] How to quantify the economic impact of OSGeo software? Your help needed for a research article

Last year I did a very odd software estimate for a client. The short story is I'm adding Open Source GIS Software to their ESRI Commercial setup. In one scenario we decided to remove All the commercial software and go with Open Source. We ended up through multiple phone calls decided that they would end up using $2500 dollars worth of ArcGISOnline a year if they wanted to keep that service.

If you multiplied that per 14,000,000 students 9 -12 [1] you have a very large number which isn't one billion, but when you start playing with the numbers you can make a software gift be anything.

In one high school at which I volunteer we did a GIS project in OpenStreetMap. The teacher applied for a grant and received about 25 new computers because of the project. We loaded them with QGIS and ArcGIS. ArcGIS was donated by ESRI (500 seats of Arcview at $whatever_arciew_costs_a_year). QGIS was free. My time to load the computers was donated.

Two years later the computers are still in good shape BUT they will not run ArcGISPro which is the new release from ESRI. So I am pushing we remove all the commercial software and make it all FOSS4G. FOSS4G is going to allow us to leverage the existing computers for a very long time. That is a larger fight of GIS Curriculum in a High School (there isn't an official one) and my time (I work for myself) and the ability to make that happen. 99% of the teachers in that school system do not know nor care what GIS is or does. When you start talking "this will save you equipment/hardware/software" costs you gain their attention quickly though.

Of course none of that has been written up because I've never had a reason to write it up - it's just a local problem with which I wrestle.

Good Luck - I hope that helps some.

Randy

[1] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=372

On 06/02/2015 08:20 AM, Newcomb, Doug wrote:
Suchith,
I am guessing that the 1 billion dollar number is for full commercial price with no volume or educational discounts for the ArcGIS Online services.  If you want to make a similar claim for the OSGeo Academy simply multiply the full retail commercial cost ( plus maintenance) , without volume or educational discounts, of the different  proprietary software packages with equivalent functionality to the tasks presented in the GeoAcademy MOOC ,  times 4000.

To add a bit more honesty, list the educational discount for the proprietary software packages , then the full commercial price.  One could make the case that the software presented in GeoAcademy does not change in price when leaving academia for the "real world", presenting an economic benefit to geospatial professionals starting careers.

Do a 10 year analysis, based on ongoing licensing purchase and maintenance costs, between the software in GeoAcademy and the proprietary software.  Multiply that times 4000.

Just a suggestion.

Doug

On Tue, Jun 2, 2015 at 7:58 AM, Suchith Anand <Suchith.Anand at nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:Suchith.Anand at nottingham.ac.uk>> wrote:
Hi all,

Few years ago, myself and colleagues here did a study  to help us understand the social history of collaborative activities within the OSGeo ecosystem.  The results were published as a research paper on "Mapping Collaboration in Open Source Geospatial Ecosystem" in Transactions in GIS (Volume 16, Issue 4, pages 581–597, 2012).

Last year after OSGIS 2014, following informal discussions with some colleagues, i decided to do a similar study to help understand the economic impact of OSGeo Software on the digital economy. To do this, we need to understand the metrics used for calculating this. Can anyone who has done similar studies in other domains help me point to any relevant articles for helping find a framework for this. We need to know the underlying metrics so we can use that same framework for this study.

For example, reading through http://news.aag.org/2015/05/aag-seeks-proposal-authors-reviewers-for-new-ap-course-in-gist/  i understand that  "In 2014, Esri announced a $1 billion gift of cloud-based ArcGIS Online software to support the Obama Administration’s ConnectEd initiative. This remarkable gift is providing free ArcGIS Online accounts to any public or private school upon request. " I am interested to understand how this $1 billion gift is calculated?  Can anyone knowledgeable on this provide the details of these metrics use for this calculation?

For example, The GeoAcademy MOOC program that our colleagues did ( i understand that for just the March 2015 cohert were 4000 students in thier program who all used QGIS), so if they all had to buy properitory software for thier study, how much will they have to pay? and will it be possible to even run a course like this ? It is important to quantify this as it will help us also appreciate  the great donation of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation and the importance of Open Principles in Education.

Once we can get details of the metrics used for the calculation of properitory software donation, we can use the same metric to understand the impact of OSGeo software donations over many years to the Global geospatial education, economy and business and help us with the new research paper that i am planning to work on "The Economic Impacts of Open Source Geospatial Software". I will acknowledge all contributions/inputs recieved from the wider community in this planned research paper. If you done similar kind of study, in other domains , it will be helpful to get your ideas. Thanks in advance.

Best wishes,

Suchith

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