I've just come back from a whirlwind trip to the Pilbara last night.  I headed up to the Rio Tinto and Birdlife International Birdwatch event - this year held not far from Hamersley Gorge.  Anyway, it's sunsets like these that are a great reward in itself. 

I'll post more information on the event once I get my head around all the data we gathered, finish sorting through my photos, and start writing the reports that are due from it...

I should start by saying that I come from a background of writing applications for various industries but mostly finance (mainly investment banking) and insurance. The switch to environmental work here at Gaia Resources has been quite a change for me.

Something I’ve personally never really understood is why organisations like OZCAM (http://www.ozcam.gov.au) exist. OZCAM’s goal is to collate all of the fauna collection data in Australia and become a portal for anyone trying to access it. This data comes from museums and other similar organisations.

OK, great, but the nagging question at the back of my mind has always been: "Why would anyone be interested?".

Yesterday, I finally understood.

Yesterday, Piers and I performed the final functional test of HermesLite, a new open source product that we will be releasing shortly for organisations to easily publish their data ready for harvesting by OZCAM. HermesLite sits inside an institutions firewall and securely sends out data from collections databases, files or whatever to a central server owned by Gaia Resources. The data is processed and put into a PostgreSQL database with MapServer and TAPIRLink on top.

So Piers, at the institution we are testing with, pressed the "Go" button, and I sat in the office and watched the server do its stuff. Suddenly, 50,000 records were pouring into the database each with taxonomic information, dates, spatial locations etc. Whilst the data was processing I kept refreshing the map that MapServer was generating from the database and sure enough points were popping up all over Australia with the species that was found there.

What I realized suddenly, is the power of this information. For environmental surveyors it's invaluable reference data, for mining companies that need to ensure they are not destroying species as they dig up the Pilbara, again invaluable, for the man (or woman) in the street it’s a fascinating look at the fauna of Australia.

From my previous work, one of the most important factors was ensuring that very precise mathematical calculations produce the right numbers on the screen for a trader in an investment bank. Something that’s only visible to a small group of people. Here, my code (hopefully) will help a huge number of people in a cross section of the community and work force.

Yesterday was a good day.

At Gaia Resources we will shortly be participating in the open source community in two ways:

• As an end user of open source applications, and
• As a developer of new open source projects (this is the new bit!).

As an end user
We are embracing open source for a number of reasons.  As an end user, from solely a business perspective, it makes sense.  If you’ve got a number of staff, paying thousands of dollars for each licence of desktop client software adds a lot to the establishment and operating cost of a business.  Admittedly, the open source desktop clients are not up to the same standard as some of the commercial packages (eg. ArcGIS and MapInfo) but they are getting better. 

Just for a minute consider software like Oracle, ESRI’s SDE, ArcServer, etc.  Pricewise, these packages are outside of our budget – and outside the budget of many of our clients.  However, we can do a lot of the things that this software will do with open source products.  Postgres, PostGIS, MapServer, GeoServer, etc etc etc… thank goodness for open source products! 

These open source products also don’t lock companies (and here I mean Gaia Resources as well as our clients), into having to use one company (i.e. whoever developed it) for every single change to the software, or to configure or even install it.  While from a commercial developer perspective, locking companies into having to use you to do all the work they want might guarantee you work in the short term, it seems to annoy clients.  It also goes against the open source philosophy that seems to be becoming more prevalent.

So we’re trying to use more open source products wherever it makes sense.

As a developer
We’ve been working on some open source projects for a little while behind the scenes. We’ve been doing our research and seeing who’s doing what out there, and talking to a lot of open source developers to learn from them about their experience.  I’ve been impressed with the levels of technical expertise in the open source developer community.  There are some amazing programmers and developers involved within the group, and there’s a good degree of enthusiasm. 

But many of the open source software products are not being developed because someone asked for it, but rather because someone thought it would be cool to develop it.  The end user seems to be occasionally forgotten, and development seems to occur for the sake of it.  The result is a great application from a developer’s perspective, but not from and end user perspective.

We’re starting on several open source projects, some small, some large.  As a commercial business, we can’t afford to forget our customer.  It’s problematic for us to develop open source products – we need to cover our costs, so someone has to fund us to undertake the work.  And those funding sources are hard to identify and find.  But we’ve had some good wins lately, so I think that open source can work in commercial operations.

Let’s see how we go over the upcoming months.

Email me directly here.*

* We’ve deliberately avoided having comments on this blog because of spambots and stupidity.  I saw something pretty cool the other day (at least in principle).  Check out the Stupidfilter for an optimistic view into a future internet.