On freedoms and sovereignty - almost everything is ready for the 9 gvSIG Conference

The international gvSIG seminars have been announced, which will take place in the last week of November and Valencia.

From the second day, a slogan was always used that indicates the focus that the corporate communication of the day will have. Looking back a bit, these have been the topics of the conference from 2006 on:

• Building Realities
• Consolidate and move forward
• Moving forward together
• We on keep growing
• To know to transform
• Conquering new spaces
• Generating future, technology, solidarity and business

And for this year, the theme “Question of Sovereignty".

We find interesting the evolution of both the tool and its aggressive internationalization strategy. Surely no one imagined in 2006 that we would have seen a free-to-use Java tool so popular in the Hispanic context… and beyond.

A pity not to be able to publish more information of the event, because for now is known only a limited statement; Which in our view as a first impression requires balancing its technical and ideological approaches in order to ensure a neutral visibility in many contexts of both Hispanic and Anglo-American thinking.

Latin American Symposiums

Those that are about to take place, in just a couple of weeks are Thursdays Conference of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), Which are the same Terceras Argentine Days  These will be from 23 to 25 in October in  Buenos Aires, under the motto “Knowledge gives freedom"

Here different very valuable use cases stand out for their diversity. It can be seen how the Brazilian projects little by little are positioned almost as a normal matter in a scenario where the language barely separates us but in practice it has manifested a significant barrier.

Alvaro Angiux will show some of the new features of gvSIG 2 and will give an interesting presentation on the gvSIG model, which should penetrate the awareness of understanding gvSIG as something more than software; Insurance to date must be difficult to sell in some countries as long as there are not enough experiences to demonstrate its operation and especially as long as local communities are small. We believe that it will be necessary to insist as it is the route that the organization has chosen as the spearhead; In the insistence, results will come, and several of these will set the tone on how to reinvent the concept in different scenarios, since the portfolio of strategies becomes balanced not when we have enough dairy cows but when we can identify the products that will be stars.

The Open Source model is not at all simple, in part because success stories are not well known. Wordpress is one of them. 10 years ago if someone had talked about the Wordpress model, very few of us would have believed it or bet efforts; today it is one of the most successful cases of a community-based model, although users know little or nothing about it unless they are bloggers or it is up to them to set up a website and make an effort to read; so for general culture the following lines summarize it:

• WordPress is a knowledge manager especially for managing content for the Internet, known as CMS.
• The posts you see, called articles, are served by WordPress. Nobody cares about that, but just so you know, publishing this article took me 26 minutes between writing, inserting the images and giving it a content review, without having to worry about anything other than writing. In the old days you had to know a lot about html content management and with all that we would never be satisfied.
• WordPress is free, nobody pays to use it. Which does not imply that having this site is free of charge; I pay 8 dollars a month for hosting Geofumadas and 15 a year for the domain geofumadas.com; This is not received by WordPress but by the company that provides me with this service. Thus, today there are millions of sites managed with WordPress and therefore many companies offering the hosting service with MySql and PHP functionalities that the system requires to run. Many would offer me accommodation for less than what I pay, but I decided to stay with this service because I am satisfied.
• Plugins are extra features, there are millions built for free by a large community that makes them almost for the love of art. But also thousands of people are dedicated to making plugins, which cost between 4 and 15 dollars. About 6 of the plugins that Geofumadas uses are paid, for which I have not regretted spending since they guarantee extra high-quality functionalities. For example, one to be able to serve the templates, one to ensure that my account is not hacked again, one to monitor online visitors, one to send newsletters, another to manage customer banners ... and so on. different depending on what the site occupies to operate in a healthy way, but also so that I can dedicate myself to my business which is writing.
• The template cost me 39 dollars, although there are many free, I liked this and I preferred to pay for it.

This is how the WordPress ecosystem works; the core itself is free, everyone has the opportunity to do business since it is open source. Some making templates, other plugins, others selling support services, others using it to communicate. Finally, it has become an interesting business in which everyone has the opportunity to use their creativity to position their services or products.

Where is the secret? In the community and of course, in the freedom to be able to do what you want with the input without any limitations other than the evolution of the technological environment that does not allow us to make dreams and forces us to be updated.

A great success in this and all service-based models (SOA) assume that the business is always the same, what varies is the environment and processes that constantly change. 7,000 years ago what man did was exchange services; one had a dead deer and the other roots, and what they did was exchange; with the freedom to do what you want with the product. Success was always in the same business: if there was a community. The bigger the better. Time evolved and the biggest market today is knowledge, and software is just that: knowledge. The incorporation of the open source model is in the integration of the community to democratize knowledge.

So, success is in understanding that the business is always the same. It happens as with land administration; If we want to complicate our lives, there are many ways, thinking about what software, the IDE standard, the LADM model, if you use hybernate, to die. The effort is in trying to remember that the business is always the same; From the history that we know best, God put Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the first thing he entrusted to them was to administer the earth, with a restricted area that was the tree of life ... then he expropriated them and threw them out ... anyway; the business is not new. But of course, the environment has changed in regulatory aspects and the process varies according to the tool used.

So, more than questioning the path that gvSIG has taken in building its model from the community; we congratulate the intention because this world does not need boxed software packages sold in the supermarket. Innovative ideas are dealt with, and if they are based on aspects such as community integration, democratization of knowledge, good.

Of course, the Open Source model is not copy / paste; gvSIG has had to integrate concepts from which we will not see results in the immediate term; not in every southern cone country. Commercial competition is more complicated, but despite the doubts it could generate today ... we must remember that it works. Not by investing a lot of money in it, rather by being disciplined and consistent in what we believe ... despite the fact that a segment of the community questions the way. Surely no one today would see a great business make a proprietary product to compete with WordPress; although there are, it is easier to live with him than against him.

It is normal, that the uncertainty is provided in the long term. What would happen if it disappears? but nobody is saved from the uncertainty in technology. So as far as possible, we must seek to support the model promoted by gvSIG, trying to understand that it is not just having a software that should not be paid for.

For now, QGIS and gvSIG are the best free client software exercises for the geospatial medium, for this they must not repeat what others already do; it means not competing with each other, but complementing what GRASS and SEXTANTE do in raster and publishing Openlayers, Geoserver and Mapserver, and so the chain goes from the most sustainable to the most vulnerable; not because it does not have great capacity but because of the reduced and not growing community.

For now, they have done quite well, however in continuity with the loose line to half article; It is convenient to refresh aspects to help:

Business is knowledge management

Not by insisting on a gvSIG conscience tint you will have more faithful. Far from attracting those who are already convinced, it can generate aversion due to the feeling that the balance between the technical and the ideological is being lost. I insist, not everyone will see it that way, but in many contexts they will earn the phrase of being "too Taliban" being able to avoid it.

It is possible to maintain the identity and approach of freedom that free software claims, but it is prudent to be balanced. Surely this changes from one country to another, but the fact of going to extremes will not add new customers to the product and rather it will generate a conflict of a thousand demons with the proprietary software that will always be there and with whom we will have to live. Do not forget that those of us who write, we do it for the private and free, will not be able to have exclusive writers if they want to appear in the first pages of the most influential sites. You may want to ignore that, but you can fall into the extremes of Stallman, in which Linux is still the best we have seen but reduced to a niche too far from the ordinary public. It is known as Linux is the tool par excellence that the most commercial sites now use, but we should see what we want to do with the GIS market, whether to keep it in an environment of gurus or look for what we have agreed in recent days: That the GIS it must become part of the general culture.

From the mistakes you have to learn, you just have to listen to a literate Japanese; And see how a whole generation now creates a wrong version of Japan's role in World War II; All for not being balanced between a beginning and a stubbornness.

Without abandoning the priority of the model, it is necessary to balance the management of what has already been achieved. It would be appropriate to invest some marketing in promoting more the potentialities of what gvSIG can do, how it has grown, how many users use it, how much more can be done with its plugins, etc.

They have already done so, but a greater effort could be made to see how the user finds answers to their basic questions more easily. The material content on the gvSIG site is abundant, but its visibility can be made easier. I will put some examples for it:

• A decision maker in a state of Mexico needs to choose which free software to use to counter the pressure of proprietary software that has been in use for almost 15 years in the 425 cadastre departments of that state. They tell you to study the gvSIG case, so you find the practical cases section (outreach.gvsig.org) and search for the word cadastre… hundreds of results. He chooses by country, and then he sees that there is an experience in Mexico recently presented in the seventh conference ... he thinks it is invaluable but then he sees that the link indicated there is broken (http://geovirtual.mx/).

The experience of the user seeking information to make a decision must be facilitated in the short time of attention that we have during the first impression. Perhaps there could be a well-worked banner that could lead to a flow of responses to: Why choose gvSIG? What gvSIG extensions allow me to do the routines that other solutions provide me? Where can I see a comparative table that indicates why go? by gvSIG? Where are there proven success stories in my country? What are the 10 steps that I must follow to assemble my solution? What do I do with my current development? What does what I want to do look like? When Java, when C ++, when PHP?… And so they can evolve into specialized answers that surely in the community can be built with great quality.
We congratulate the reach of the large community of users and all their contributions, but the way the structured content is now is made for the user that already exists, similar to what happens with the conferences, which seem to be oriented to the existing user. Valuable responses from lists are lost in a never-ending thread that is almost impossible to reach efficiently. The new one will have a hard time solving his immediate problems. Investing in content for new users would be useful to ensure better management of the knowledge already accumulated.

Nor is it about wanting to say that we are the best, only to tell how well we have done but in content prepared with the aim of answering the most common doubts of the new user. The rest, you will be able to read later in the publications that have come out with each day, good practices, distribution lists ... but from the outset, let's take a small percentage of the money it costs to develop a day and help you to know what our product and model it's good.

Better knowledge management would imply seeing how the hundreds of presentations provided in the lectures, which are very rich because they are real, can be efficiently organized as special use cases to be able to serve as a reference beyond the day. What not to say about the recordings of the presentations and answers solved through the distribution lists. Much more if the community's best potential of gvSIG is made visible, to ensure that the new user knows with whom and how to resolve doubts when they are going to need them.

For a few days here the sister software, QGIS, is doing it. It is to ensure that it is not only a good tool but that it also appears to be a good one. The image sells, and if the image reflects the reality of what you have, it will be able to position itself as a good product for everyone. It is not consumerism marketing, it is the same business that 7,000 years ago used to wash tubers well to make them look clean even though no one had ever used a toothbrush.

From the WordPress example there are things to learn; Without losing the vision of freedom that gvSIG pursues that we understand is more visionary.

 And well, to stop the issue that we will talk about later, here are some topics that we will see in the days of Argentina.

• GvSIG 2 News
• Development of a Geographic Information System (GIS) for the monitoring of a basin
• Comparison of GIS Desktop Tools. Case Study: Territorial Planning Plans
• Determining the Scope of the Universal Postal Service in Uruguay
• Qualification of rural extension work in Paraná / gvSIG applied to geotechnics
• Evaluation of interpolation models for isolation calculation in the O'Higgins region
• Geographic Information Systems applied as Educational Technologies in processes of Training and Educational Update for the Conservation of Nature
• Geographic information system to locate bibliographic material in libraries with open collections
• State Register of Public Forests of Amapá
• Free geomatics solution for intermodal transport
• Phytosanitary Surveillance System for field application
• The use of gvSIG in the identification of strategic points for the installation of a factory
• Methodology to elaborate physical and environmental diagnosis 
• Atlas of the Pampa: bases for the territorial ordering
• Geographical and satellite atlas of the Pampa province - Argentina
• The use of spatial data focused on the monitoring of precipitation
• Delimitation of the flood spot with gvSIG and sextant in the municipality of Sete Barras
• Geoportal Costanera of Villa María. Province of Cordoba
• Spatial data infrastructure in the General Directorate of Statistics and Censuses Chubut - IDE DGEyC
• Atlas digital multimedia SABEN: "Sácama, beautiful by nature"
• Evolution of the cadastral structure of the province of La Pampa
• The gvSIG Project and free software in the framework of the Armed Forces
• Drawing the environment with gvSIG
• Geo Framework for Large Organizations
• Creation and management of municipal database with gvSIG. Case of Monte Hermoso municipality, prov. from Buenos Aires}
• The use of gvSIG in the estimation of biogas production in the Sanga Ajuricaba Basin

In short, very good to make a better management of the knowledge they represent ... to ensure that those who have never used gvSIG see it; and they think it is just software.

To know more about the days from Argentina

To know more about the days From Valencia