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

Jody Garnett jody.garnett at gmail.com
Sat May 7 05:18:01 PDT 2016


Steve as a member of our community you should be in position describing
your research, and your upcoming topic with a blog post on the osgeo
website to get more response.

Reading your form I am not sure how many organizations could be in position
to provide numbers.
--
Jody Garnett

On 6 May 2016 at 14:09, Steven Feldman <shfeldman at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>

-- 
--
Jody Garnett
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