“The need for National level strategy for Open Principles in Geospatial”

Dr. Suchith AnandUniversity of Nottingham

Big picture

In the UK there are 433 principal authorities: 27 county councils, 55 unitary authorities, 32 London boroughs, 36 Metropolitan boroughs, 201 districts, 32 Scottish unitary authorities, 22 Welsh unitary authorities, and 26 Northern Ireland districts ,and every single one of them are using GIS

So imagine the costs per year of taxpayers money spend for buying proprietary GIS licences !

The need for cost savings

Open source GIS software will help the local authorities and various government departments in reducing huge licence fee costs for proprietary software and the UK Government and taxpayers as a whole will benefit from cost efficiencies, reduce the cost of lock-in to suppliers and products.

This is especially important for future IT investments (for example Cloud Computing) , so that more options are explored and choices available.

Why ?Now imagine the costs for not one year costs but costs for 10 years , 25 years, 50 years from now etc. It will be in billions of taxpayers money that should be spend for expanding investment in schools, universities, healthcare etc NOT keeping paying to buy high cost proprietary GIS licences when there are now lot of open alternatives available and many other countries are already doing this.

It will help also create and accelerate local innovation opportunities in location based technologies and stimulate local industry and accelerate new jobs creation in digital economy for value added services building upon technologies.

Geospatial Standards (for ex. OGC spec.)

Maturity of open source software (for

ex. OSGeo stack)

Open Data

Ability for showing the operation of general laws

is fundamental for scientific research

Big Picture – Openness is key for innovation in GIS

Open Source strategy for the UK government (Jan 2010)

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/open-source-open-standards-and-re-use-government-action-plan

Open principles is now implemented by the UK Government and delivering huge cost savings for government

£409 million in the first half of 2013 alone

http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/news/government-bodies-must-comply-open-standards-principles

Open Data – key for innovation and transparency

Increasing software quality by community peer review

Reuse big enabler for government departments in cost savings and increasing efficiencies

Some successful examples of transition from proprietary systems to open source GIS in UK government

These need to be replicated fast across UK government departments to enable wider cost savings and increasing efficiencies

Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead

https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/blog/2016/03/using-open-source-gis-in-the-public-sector/

https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-government/case-studies/warwickshire-county-council-new-web-gis.html

Warwickshire County Council

1. How much (roughly) is the UK government (central/local government etc) spending in buying properitery GIS licences for the last 10 years (2005-2015)? Is there any plans for on savings target for the next 10 years ?

2. How many SMEs and jobs have been created in the UK through the creation of Open Geo ecosystem in the last 5 years (open source geospatial software and open data)?

3. What are the important steps needed for accelerating Open Innovation in location based technologies for expanding the Digital economy opportunities for the future.

Key questions?

RDA Geospatial IG and Geo4All ThinkTank meeting on 8th June 2016 for starting the process of Open Geospatial Science Vision 2030

Vision 2030Science should always be open

Geospatial Science should be fully build on Open PrinciplesTransparency of research is fundamental (no black boxes or proprietary barriers).

Geospatial Science = Open Geospatial Science

Open Geospatial Labs are being established worldwide to scale up research and teaching globally as part of the ICA-OSGeo MoU

We need an action plan for moving forward

We are especially interested in examples of ideas and action plans from local authorities to make use of open technologies (esp in GIS) for helping reduce the high proprietary GIS licence costs as it is one of the biggest IT expenses in GIS. So you can imagine the cumulative annual costs for the UK government for keeping buying proprietary GIS . Now imagine the costs for not just one year but in the future 5, 10 , 25 years.

This is especially important for Smart Cities programs and will help build an ecosystem at the local level and help create big opportunities for industry, SMEs and startups in the UK . This will create innovation opportunities locally.

In order to start this process, we will need to follow up ideas on the following:

1. Start collating casestudies of successful migrations from central and local governments in the UK.

2. Bring together a team of key people to develop an action plan for National level strategy for Open Principles in Geospatial. We will also link this to our Vision 2030 for Open Geospatial Science[1]. Anyone interested to contribute on this please email Suchith.Anand@nottingham.ac.uk

Next Steps

[1] http://opensourcegeospatial.icaci.org/2016/06/open-consultation-on-the-vision-2030-for-open-geospatial-science/

3. There should be a vision to establish a National Centre for Open Government with expertise in Open Technologies and Open Data to build best practices in open source geospatial implementations in government and share ideas . There needs to be support and training facilities available for the local GIS departments who are migrating to Open Source GIS solutions. Investing in people is important. Scalability (without worring about exponential increases in licensing costs) will also be a important factor in cost savings and efficiencies. We already have dedicated Open Source Geospatial Labs in key research universities in the UK who can provide the expertise needed.

4. Detailed study on how much (roughly) is the UK government (central/local government etc) spending in buying properitery GIS licences for the last 10 years (2005-2015)? There needs to be clear plans for savings target for the next 10 years ?

Next Steps

Thanks to all participants, and wider geospatial community

for the inputs