Paul Ramsey

A survey of funding models underpinning the community development process at the heart of successful open source software projects.

Government IT has been in a spiral of declining in-house expertise and increasing dependence on external contractors. The solution is to commit to re-skilling and building in smaller increments, to reduce risk and provide success in smaller, faster increments.

Open source development involves interlocking economies of attention, and mutual benefit, and money. The system is both highly prolific, and dangerously weak in places, and knowing how it works is important for organizations using and developing open source.

A keynote on the technology trends shaping GIS: utility computing, free software, free data and machine learning. Put them all together, make them cheap and ubiquitous, what does the future look like?

Government geomatics agencies are at an inflection point, where the value they provide is being overtaken by that generated in the private sector. What are some strategies to maintain relevance and continue to provide value to citizens?

Delivered at the closing plenary of FOSS4G 2013 in Nottingham, UK, this talk explores what makes an open source citizen, and what open source citizens have to do in the future.

A review of the history of open source collaboration, and the business reasons for managers to explore using open source in their organizations.

Geographical information systems (GIS) have been in a conceptual box for too long. Practitioners need to break out and see their expertise within the context of the larger field of information technology and the web.

A keynote presentation to FOSS4G 2011 (http://2011.foss4g.org), the international conference on open source geospatial software, with over 900 attendees.

The nature of open source, the value companies create with it, and the way it gains strength from the wider technosphere all point to a rich future ahead.

Is open source a disruptive technology, of the sort described by Clayton Christensen? A look at the history and some examples.

An exploration of the principles of open data and open systems, and their relationship to public service and good government, with a bent towards geospatial use cases.