[Board] How big is the Open Source Geo developer and consultancy community?

[Steven Feldman]

I have wanted to try to pull together some very basic economic numbers about open source geo for a while now. Then when I got the good news that my talk on “There is no such thing as a free lunch” had been accepted for FOSS4G 2016, I decided to have a crack at crowdsourcing some numbers which I hope to include in my talk in August. There are two elements to this exercise
Supply – How big is the business of Open Source Geo? i.e the companies and full time or near to fully time consultants working in  this space
Usage – How much Open Source Geo software is deployed and what value does it create or displace?
At the moment I am focussing on the supply side because it feels like a more manageable task, perhaps some others will step up and offer to help estimate the usage side.

This survey aims to gather some basic stats on companies (from one man bands to very large companies) whose activities are based on the provision of development and services in Open Source Geo (either wholly or a significant part). Even though revenue and employee numbers will often be available from public sources, I will only present the results in aggregated formats to ensure that individual company info cannot be derived from my presentation. If you are uncertain about providing information to this survey please check with a senior manager within your organisation before responding.

So why should you help me to make an estimate of the size of the Open Source Geo business? I think that size does matter when you are in the software business, potential users often gain confidence from larger numbers – more users, a larger industry with more employees and more revenues – why would this not be the case for Open Source Geo when we are  frequently facing FUD merchants. I believe that collating some economic data on the Open Source Geo business can help all of us to respond better when confronted with questions about the commercial sustainability of our community.

There is a bit more info about the survey at http://knowwhereconsulting.co.uk/size-matters

The survey is at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1xZaq6Z4NMOuXm6jOEifScBS6qW0FSMt47AKb3Fm6JmA/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks for any help you can offer to further publicise this survey

Cheers
______
Steven


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