[OSGeo-Discuss] Inviting examples of Open Source Geospatial and Open Data in empowering people and organisations and creating new opportunities

[Suchith Anand]

We would like invite articles from Industry , Universities/Education, Startups, NGOs,  Governments  on examples of how Open Geospatial Software and Open Data is empowering them and created many new opportunities for "Geo for All" http://www.geoforall.org/   newsletters.

Even proprietary GIS vendors and their business partners make huge use of and rely heavily on open source for their business[1] . That is true empowerment and we want to get more examples from the wider community for our newsletter

* Examples of  Open Source Geospatial and Open Data empowering and creating new opportunities for Geospatial Industry 
* Examples of  Open Source Geospatial and Open Data empowering and creating new opportunities for Startups
* Examples of  Open Source Geospatial and Open Data empowering and creating new opportunities for Universities/Education
* Examples of  Open Source Geospatial and Open Data empowering  and creating new opportunities for Government organisations
* Examples of  Open Source Geospatial and Open Data empowering and creating new opportunities for NGOs 

We are esp. interested to hear from government organisations/regional/local authorities on  how Open source GIS software helped the local authorities and various government departments in reducing huge annual licence fee costs for proprietary  software and the taxpayers as a whole benifitted from cost efficiencies,  reduce the cost of lock-in to suppliers and products. Now imagine the costs for  not just one year but in the future 5, 10 , 25 years. The savings will be billions of dollars of taxpayers money globally which can be invested by governments in  education, healthcare etc.

As more and more government organisations, national, regional and local authorities rapidly move to QGIS and other Open source solutions for enhanced efficiency and lower costs , there is a need for support services and an ecosystem at the local level which is in fact the BIGGEST OPPORTUNITY for SMEs and startups  to fill in .  There should be a strong ecosystem (universities, local government, SMEs etc)  to enable create conditions  for  many  new opportunities [2]   to be created in Open Geospatial ecosystem  , so that there will be lot of jobs creation as well as innovation opportunities. So examples from Startups in OSGeo ecosystem are very welcome. There is already a great list of service providers of OSGeo ecosystem and this is just the start.

So please do send examples of how Open Source Geospatial and Open Data is empowering and creating new opportunities from Geospatial Industry, Startups, Education, NGOs, Government organisations to our chief editor of "Geo for All" newsletter -Dr. Nikos Lambrinos, Dept. of Primary Education Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (  Email - labrinos at eled.auth.gr )

Best wishes,

Suchith

[1] http://www.gogeomatics.ca/magazine/osgeo-presents-geo-for-all-initiative-may-30-ottawa-social.htm
[2]  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat
[3] http://www.osgeo.org/search_profile?SET=1



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