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#geomob at the AGI

Mr Osborne over at his cloudsourced blog provides a taster to the Geomob thread at this months AGI conference along with details of a reduced day rate deal.

This is really the reason I’m going along to the AGI this year, as you may remember I was disappointed with the introspection and backwards thinking demonstrated at last years conference and had all but given up attending. However the injection of a little web2.0 new blood and ideas was just the tonic to turn things around for me.

So Kudos to Christopher and Steven for injecting new life into the conference, I’m looking forward in particular to the GeoCommunity Soapbox !

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network

3 replies on “#geomob at the AGI”

The “Paleotards” as you put it are often the people trying to make the point to those brandishing the whizzy new app on their iPhone that it won’t be any good until there’s some actual, valid, up-to-date, accurate data behind it.

“What is a GI professional?” Is it someone who builds a soon out of date mashup using Bing maps then quickly moves on to the next web 2.0 hype that takes their fancy? Or is it someone who actually knows about handling GI data properly and cares about whether it’s used appropriately?

“Why does nobody listen to us?” Easy. Cooking up a whizzy new app gets attention (as evidenced by your blog posts), but what really matters is ensuring the data behind the apps is correct. I suspect this is because it’s easier to get funding to develop a new app than it is to get funding to clean data, and that apps are often ready to go but the data is not sorted. Then, to meet the launch deadline, the data issue seems to be ignored or shifted to “phase 2” before being quietly forgotten. Only the “Paleotards” keep banging on about it.

“We should stop fighting amongst ourselves.” Yes we should. No we shouldn’t. 😉

While some people have their heads in the clouds (no pun intended) of the future (and we need people like that), the “Paleotards” are often working in the real world. Sometimes what’s needed is not a new system, but better data in the existing system. What tends to happen is that a new system is implemented with the same old bad data.

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