What is Open Source GIScience?
This is a reflection on readings regarding Open Source GIScience for Friday, Feb 26, 2021
While much opportunity exists as the world around us becomes ever more digital, Open Source GIScience has a long way to go. In brief, Open Source GIScience is the democratic, open-source, free use of GIScience and GIS platforms like QGIS to better understand the world around us, and democratizing:
- access to such platforms, allowing a larger number of users to enter the field,
- access to data, bettering the availability of high quality data for GIS analysis, and
- access to the code behind programs, allowing for users to better understand how the tools they are using work.
Unfortunately, this field is still in its infancy. Academia often privileges the results and conclusions of analysis, rather than the process of analysis and contribution to understanding of the inner-workings of such analyses themselves. This relegates contribution to the Open Source GIScience ecosystem to the back burner, incentivizing geographers and potential contributors to work towards more formalized forms of research and publication. Additionally, on the surface at least, it seems like the “industry standard” in the field of GIS still remains paid/licensed platforms like ESRI’s ArcGIS, which both a) limit access to the GIS field and b) maintain fairly opaque inner workings.
While some issues that still need to be worked out do certainly exist - how grading and evaluation works in an open-source format for example, it’s hard to base it solely on contribution when some students may enter courses with higher literacy in coding, open-source platforms, etc - the emergence of Open Source GIScience marks an important step in the democratizing of GIS analysis to wider swaths of the public, something that is key in better understanding of the world and our own ecological and population systems.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.