Open Source: Making a career out of "free"

UCL, February 2017

Jo Cook / @archaeogeek

The Questions

Who is this person standing up here?

Who does she work for?

What do they do?

What technologies do they use?

What's our day to day work like?

What skills are important?

What's not so important?

Who is this person?

Maths → Underwater Archaeology → Land Archaeology → Astun Technology = No qualifications in GIS!

I'm a consultant and metadata lead at Astun Technology. I studied Mathematics at the University of Durham, then Underwater Archaeology at the University of St Andrews, worked as a land archaeologist with Oxford Archaeology for 10 years, and then joined Astun Technology 6 years ago.

Experience

Archaeologists have a lot of uses for GIS and generate truck-loads of data

Archaeologists have no money, so I tried open source software

but at the time, this was hard work!

In the 0's the established open source GIS package was GRASS, which was command-line only. QGIS was at version 0.7

This lead to an involvement with the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), and I spoke at FOSS4G 2007 in Victoria, British Columbia

In 2006 I set up a OSGeo:UK to promote the use of open source GIS in the UK

That was before such things as Ordnance Survey open data and open street map so we campaigned about that too

My involvement in OSGeo lead to my accepting a role at Astun as a Consultant. I now consider myself a "recovering" archaeologist

Our primary product is a suite called iShare that allows organisations to easily add maps and other spatial content on their website

It's based on the open source stack of PostgreSQL, PostGIS, MapServer, OGR and OpenLayers

Who are our customers?

Councils, Local Authorities, Police Forces, Government Organisations, Mapping Companies...

We provide data aggregation services for OS base mapping, address data, NHS Choices, EduBase, Modern Gov, police.uk...

These are provided as WMS/WFS for our clients

and contribute back by committing to projects, sponsoring development, and organising conferences

As a consultant I help scope projects out, install the software, configure it, hook it up to their data, train them and troubleshoot any problems

As our metadata lead I also look after all our metadata projects and our internal metadata portal

We also have arguments about which text editor is best!

Opinion is basically split between Sublime Text and Vim

Open source is purely about licensing the source code. There's no limitation on charging for development of solutions based on that code

As long as you provide the source code of the core software under it's original license you can charge for anything else. That includes development, installation, consultancy, training, maintenance...

General IT Skills are very useful

Scripting: python, bash, SQL

Version Control: Git, Mercurial

Trouble-shooting/Problem-solving

GIS skills need to be broad-based

Server-based databases, a good overview of packages and formats

Standards and web-optimised formats like json

Multi-purpose libraries and languages (OGR, Python)

General people skills are the most important of all!

Self-learning

Self-motivation

Project/Task/Time Management

What's not so important

In-depth knowledge of a particular software package

Qualifications (sorry)

The tools work better, so now we focus on improving and monitoring their deployment and use in high-pressure enterprise environments

Tools for virtualisation, deployment, monitoring, eg Virtual Servers, virtualenv, Docker, Vagrant, GeoHealthCheck

Python

Both open source and proprietary GIS use python

It has modules for working with rasters, vectors, databases and many more

You WILL be able to write working code within minutes of starting to use it!

Learn about virtual environments for isolating your code

Scripting

Whether it's bash, dos, powershell, OGR, SQL, learn to write scripts to do your work rather than relying on a GUI

If you have to repeat a task more than once, write a script to do it

GitHub

The easiest way to learn about repositories and version control

It's not just for code- share documentation/presentations/data/your CV

Both proprietary and open source GIS companies have an increasing presence

Look at code to try and understand how things work

Check issues and commits for bug fixes

Things to take away

It is definitely possible to make a career in open source GIS!

Open source and proprietary software are not mutually exclusive

Learning cross-platfrom tools will get you a step up, whatever area you go into

Scripting and SQL will provide a flexible and powerful alternative to desktop-GIS workflows