Last week I had the distinct pleasure of attending las 3es Jornadas gvSIG, the third annual gvSIG conference, in Valencia, Spain. gvSIG, as you may know, is a (primarily) desktop GIS system written in Java. The project was initiated in 2003 by the Conselleria d’Infraestructures i Transport for the Generalitat Valenciana, the provincial government of Valencia. The gvSIG project started incubation in OSGeo this September.
gvSIG is an interesting case in the OSGeo world as it is (to my knowledge) the only Open Source GIS project where the majority of the project development is done in Spanish, and not in English. This has created a situation for the majority Anglophone OSGeo community with regard to gvSIG that is not unlike observing the proverbial iceberg: Most of us English speakers have seen only the bit that sticks up above the linguistic water line, and are unaware of the vast amount of effort and collaboration that has gone on underneath.
The three days I spent last week at the annual gvSIG conference made for a truly impressive scuba diving trip below that linguistic water line. The conference drew a diverse audience of several hundred attendees from Europe and Latin America. As the conference - and indeed gvSIG itself - has largely been funded by government agencies, the crowd here has been a pretty fascinating mix of hackers and bureaucrats, one that is hopefully representative of the future role of Open Source GIS in governments around the world.
The theme of the conference, Consolidar i Avançar, “to consolidate and advance,” accurately reflects the state of the project, as seen by case studies from academia and government, ranging from Spain to Venezuela. (Luckily for me, live translation to English of the mostly Castillian language program.) Ongoing work on the project was presented as well, including efforts to automate metadata extraction in gvSIG, and to port the platform to mobile devices. Much was made of the successful and ongoing deployment of gvSIG for various purposes across the Valencian government, from the civic works department, to the port authority, to the aforementioned transport bureau that started it all.
The talk that most caught my eye, however, was a case study by Fabián Camargo, from Fonda Andaluz de Municipios para la Solidaridad International, or FAMSI. The project essentially entailed an effort to deploy a GIS infrastructure for civic planning, data collection, and so on for small municipal governments in rural Guatemala.
Sr. Camargo made an observation that, I think, perfectly captures the considerable value of Free and Open Source software to the less wealthy parts of the world, where, perhaps, the analytical capacities of GIS for environmental and civic planning is needed most. He said — and I paraphrase in English — “We could not buy the licenses for proprietary GIS software. If we tell the mayor of this village what the software license alone costs, he will go nuts. Should he spend all this money on GIS software? He would rather use the money to fix the roads in his village.”
He added: “But we could not even simply obtain the software without a license. If we were to pirate the proprietary software, we would only get it in English — and then no one in the village would be able to use it.”
There has been a great deal of debate in the past few years about the “total cost of ownership” of proprietary software versus Open Source software, and a great deal of FUD generated by spurious research surveys funded by those same proprietary software companies. Whatever the truth may be, the fact remains that, in more economically developed regions, trained labor is expensive. In principle, a government agency might be able to economize by obtaining software that requires less training to use and maintain, though, clearly, the matter is still in doubt.
The matter is far less uncertain in the rural and still-urbanizing parts of the global South, and perhaps in places like Eastern Europe, where provincial and municipal governments have no budget for GIS — or if they do have, the budgets might run to a few thousand dollars a year at most. In such places, proprietary software licenses are much more expensive in proportion to available finances, while human labor costs proportionally far less than in the West — perhaps as little as one-fifth or one-tenth as much in rural India, for example. To quote Sr. Camargo, “El software libre salva la limitación económica en la adquisición de licensias.” In other words, Open Source is not only a logical option — it is the only option. “A very feasible alternative, economically speaking,” he concluded.
Sr. Camargo’s talk highlighted two obstacles to the use of Open Source GIS in municipal governments in Latin America: First, he emphasized that in-depth training “before, during, and after the project” was an absolute necessity for its success. Gabriel Carrión Rico, director of the gvSIG project, addressed this during the question-and-answer afterwards, saying — quite earnestly — “We are not going to just give people computers. We are going to teach them to use them - to teach them to fish, not just give them food.”
Clearly, OSGeo projects, and the companies that depend on them, need to continue giving serious thought to the development comprehensive training programs to help establish a corps of educated and competent F/OSS GIS professionals around the world. The Spanish-language OSGeo community has begun to address this in a deliberate way, starting with a Creative Commons licensed textbook on GIS theory and analysis, written by a committed group of contributors, and spearheaded by the formidable Victor Olaya. The textbook, which looks to be suitable fodder for a university course, already runs to a couple hundred pages, and is, of course, written in Spanish.
This brings us quite naturally to the other obstacle to the use of OSGeo software in smaller and/or less well-off governments around the world: Language. The need is obvious but the solutions are less so. Miguel Montesinos, a developer on the still-embryonic gvSIG Mobile project, observed, “We have translated gvSIG into fourteen languages — and now, when someone adds a button to the gvSIG user interface, fourteen other people must take action.” Given its Spanish speaking roots, gvSIG comes with a development and user community ready made to embrace potential users in large parts of the world where the options are gvSIG — and its Open Source cousins, like GRASS — or no GIS tools at all.
However, the strength that gvSIG derives from its literally provincial roots has also been a bit of a hindrance. While the gvSIG user conference is nearly comparable in size to FOSS4G itself, awareness of gvSIG’s capacities and the vibrancy of its community approaches nil in the Anglophone Free Software world, its icy bulk hidden below the water line. The project’s code base is, to all intents and purposes, written in Spanish, which lowers the bar for Spanish-speaking developers, but raises the barrier to contribution by the wider global Free Software community — so much so that the gvSIG Mobile developers made a conscious attempt to start writing code in English, as it were, to make it easier to attract international collaboration.
I wish I had ready answers for this problem. Commons-based peer production enhances efficiency of labor allocation, according to Yochai Benkler, because participants can determine their own means and level of participation. Breaking the water’s surface is a must for projects like gvSIG to achieve their fullest potential, and likewise for Anglophone projects (i.e. most of them) to reach the widest possible audience. Surely, the solution must lie in the means we already possess — some combination of software and community practice needs to be developed to help either facilitate new divers, or else raise up the iceberg.
Whatever the solutions turn out to be, I’m going to be keeping a close eye on gvSIG from now on (with my Spanish-English dictionary to hand, of course).
