Monthly Archives: August 2014


Jubal Harpster
Jubal Harpster


Jubal was interviewed for GeoHipster by Christina Boggs.




What has kept you in the geospatial field?















What are you working on outside of work time?








Do you have anything else to share with GeoHipster readers?

Thanks, this has been fun. You can see some of the stuff we’re working on here and here: . Do I get a t-shirt now?

Ed.: Yes


Steve Coast to GeoHipster: “You try stuff and 90% of it’s gonna fail, and you should be happy with that”


Steve Coast
Steve Coast

Steve Coast is the founder of Open Street Map and Head of OSM at Telenav.

Steve was interviewed for GeoHipster by Atanas Entchev, incorporating question suggestions from Renee Sieber and Christina Boggs.

Q: Last week was the 10th anniversary of Open Street Map, which you founded. Congratulations! OSM and you personally got a lot of press, all of it good. Will that further the cause or OSM?

A: It’s a key part of the PR effort. At least it used to be. I’m not sure it has the same importance today, because there are so many people doing the same thing, but it’s part of that.

Q: My wife is my one-person focus group who has been remarkably accurate on most things Internet. She doesn’t use OSM. How will you convince her to start using it?

A: Open Street Map itself is not particularly designed to be used as a consumer product. It’s other people that make stuff on top of Open Street Map that package it in such a way that it’s usable by anybody. An example in the United States and now in the rest of the world would be Scout — a navigation client that Telenav makes. So we take Open Street Map and we spend a lot of time making it usable, so consumers can use it for turn-by-turn navigation. But today the focus of Open Street Map itself is about getting people to contribute data, not necessarily to use it. So it’s perfectly fine if your wife or anyone else wants to use another product, that makes a lot of sense.

Q: You currently work for Telenav, whose mission is to make people’s lives less stressful. Does your job make your life less stressful? What do you do for Telenav?

A: Historically I have been working on making sure that Scout works for consumers. Making sure the navigation information is there, making sure the addressing works, making sure the consumer experience is great behind Open Street Map. So I work with a team of a large number of people, 120 now we are up to, to make it all work. My official title is Head of OSM.

Q: In your most recent video you talk about why “Open Street Map is going to win”. What do you mean “to win”? Win what?

A: I mean having the best map in the world. Not necessarily the best consumer experience but the best map data. It’s already the best display map, right? So the next question is can it also be the best addressable map and the best navigable map. Those are the next two things to go after.

Q: What is the future of OSM? Gamification? Monetization?

A: Lots of people have monetized Open Street Map, including Telenav. The gamification, personally I love that, but OSM today is a lot of communities and lots of people, and you have to make a case for those people that it should be gamified. And in fact people do make apps on the side to try and gamify things like the collection of data on mobile devices, but getting changes and integration into the main site is hard because it affects a lot of people. But that doesn’t stop you from making your own app on the side to do these things.

Q: Is there a future in which the majority of contributions to OSM will be from passive sensing of location?

A: Again, with Telenav we’ve purchased a lot of GPS traces to get the navigable information into the map itself. So people already do that. OSM itself started with GPS traces, before we had aerial imagery. So I guess you can say we started with passive stuff and we just got better at it over time.

Q: What do you think of CC BY-SA?

A: I think Creative Commons is great. It’s fantastic. It works very well for creative works like books and photos. Unfortunately it didn’t work super well for data, like we have in OSM. Which is why we spent a lot of time on the Open Database License. Which is designed to be actually very similar to Creative Commons, just different enough that it covers the data use cases.

Q: Some have asked “Why not just release the data in the public domain?”, but isn’t the issue that in some countries in Europe (not in the US), you just can’t release your work into the public domain? You must release it under some kind of license?

A: That exists. In some countries it’s called the moral right. You can’t give up the copyright in the same way you can’t sell yourself into slavery. Do I particularly care? No, as long as I don’t live in one of those countries, and you can always sign a waiver that effectively does the same thing.

Q: Does OSM have a moral imperative? Is OSM out there to do good? Should the GUI be developed to maximize the diversity of participants? Enhance democracy? Is there such goal?

A: I think that it’s good that there are people involved in the project that do want to do that, and they are interested in OSM from a different perspective. That enhances what we get done, because of the diversity of opinion. Me personally, I was just out to create a map. Those other things are good things, it just wasn’t my focus, but it’s good that there are people on OSM who are focused on that.

Q: Little is known about Steve Coast, the person. Tell us more about yourself — any hipstery hobbies? I hope you ride a unicycle or grow your own hops. Do you?

A: I go hang gliding. I am completing my private pilot’s license. I ride bicycles. I think that’s it.

Q: What is going on with Map Club?

A: I shut it down. Everyone in OSM is a volunteer, and the question was could we create some sort of membership organization that could be self-supporting and go do things. Whether those things are building tools, or collecting more data. We have two choices: either everyone’s a volunteer or everyone works for a company. The companies tend to have overlapping interests with OSM but they are not the same interests. We can work together, and it can be beneficial, but it’s not like you have directly identical goals. So the question is could you do something in-between? A membership organization came to be the one way to go. Unfortunately wasn’t convincing enough so it didn’t work out. But it was worth a try.

Q: What is the takeaway from this experience? What’s the lesson learned? That people don’t want to pay for mapping?

A: I don’t think it is that people don’t want to pay. It’s two things. One: The amount of money required was a bit more than I’d hoped. You could pick $100/year but then you’d need a lot of people, but if it could be $50/month — which is what people are paying for their cell phone — then you can get a lot more done. The actual model could work if it was slightly different. I was undercharging. Second: What is the value that you are offering. And there wasn’t a clear value proposition. It was an experiment. What can we achieve? And it was difficult to find out what we could go do because we didn’t have any money. It was very chicken-and-egg.

Q: This from a GeoHipster contributor: You are so playful and fun… After being in the industry so long, how do you keep a smile?

A: Ha ha ha. That’s a really good question… I just don’t take this stuff seriously I guess. On one level I take it very seriously because obviously finishing the project and getting the data out there is important, but on another level, I think, the simple answer is being very aware that you’re going to die one day. So it’s hard to get upset and angry about stuff when you realize that. It’s more important to go build things and show people and just be happy that 90% of the stuff that you’re gonna do is going to fail, like Map Club, for example. Most people never try to do anything at all. So you try stuff and 90% of it’s gonna fail, and you should be happy with that.

Michael Byrne: “Make things easier”

Michael Byrne
Michael Byrne


This interview is a personal response.

Michael was interviewed for GeoHipster by Atanas Entchev.













A: You’ll have to stay tuned. What I do know is that the telecom and broadband landscape was very, very opaque. The National Broadband Map, and in particular  opened up the opportunity to make that more transparent to many many people who never had the chance to know the underlying structure of advanced communications and how it affects them personally.















A: Make things easier.

Adena Schutzberg: “What will change GIS education is interest in and support for competency-based learning”

Adena Schutzberg
Adena Schutzberg

Adena Schutzberg is Executive Editor of Directions Magazine and the Principal of ABS Consulting Group, Inc., a GIS consulting firm providing services to clients including GIS software, data, and imagery companies. She has a passion for education and has taught geography and GIS informally, in residence and on-line. She holds a BA in Chemistry from the University of Chicago and an MS in Geography from Pennsylvania State University.

Adena was interviewed for GeoHipster by Atanas Entchev.

Q: You have been writing about GIS for a long time. Do you consider yourself a journalist first and a GIS professional second, or vice versa?

A: I’m most definitely a GIS person who writes about the topic. I’ve never studied journalism formally. If you saw the comments from my college and grad school professors about my writing, you would wonder how I got here!

I learned to write on the job from some great editors at Esri, TenLinks, Professional Surveyor and Directions Magazine. What they say is true: if you write about things you really care about, you write far better.

Q: We first met 20 years ago when you gave an ArcCAD presentation at Esri-Danvers. You chided the preceding presenter — a salesperson — for apparently spending too much time on learning PowerPoint and not enough time to learn ArcCAD. Have things changed? Is form and the wow factor still considered more important in GIS sales presentations than substance and function?

A: Wow, I don’t remember that comment, but it sure sounds like something I’d say! Back when we rolled out ArcCAD, both AutoCAD and PC ArcInfo users were anxious to see how it worked and what it looked like. I think my point was to address what people wanted to know, vs. what we (as sales and marketing people) thought they should know.

The big change today is that users and potential users are more savvy about geospatial products and services. The technical, and even some management staff want to get their hands on them and see how the products work.

I like to think the majority of dull sales presentations and demos are behind us! Except for the most complex or customized solutions, today’s sales cycle is much more likely to involve a free evaluation of some kind. I think we are over the hump of “wow” stuff; that reflects the relative maturity of both GIS software and the user and potential user community.

Q: I loved ArcCAD. It was a great product, and it had dedicated following. Apparently not enough to keep it alive, though. But this begs a bigger question: Do users want GIS and CAD to work together? Or GIS and data visualization, or GIS and geodesign, or GIS and BIM. Over the years I have seen many attempts to marry GIS to some other discipline and field, but the marriage never happens, or ends up in divorce. Why do you think that is?

A: My sense after following CAD/GIS integration for many years is that many people thought they wanted tight integration. At the end of the day, the horizontal offerings never really yielded the promised synergy. That’s why products like GeoSQL, ArcCAD, AutoCAD Map, MGE, MicroStation Geographics and others never really made it big.

The integrated CAD/GIS products that bring in some money for their developers today are vertical solutions for electric, gas, pipeline and other areas.

I’m reminded of a marketing story where a focus group of teens were asked about and shown a new MP3 player. When queried if they thought they’d buy the pink one or the black one, almost everyone in attendance said they wanted a pink one. On the way out of the meeting, the organizers as a thank you asked attendees to take home a device from a pile of pink and black ones. They all (boys and girls) selected the black players.

Q: You work three jobs: Executive Editor at Directions Magazine, President of your own company ABS Consulting Group, and Senior Lecturer at Penn State University. Tell us what you do at each.

A: At this point I’m really doing just the first two. I left Penn State a few years back. I was teaching in the online Masters in GIS program. Now I serve on the advisory board for the degree.

My work at Directions is mostly writing All Points Blog, putting together articles, and covering conferences. My favorite part of the job is covering GIS education, a relatively new beat for the magazine.

My consulting firm in recent years has taken on short term projects addressing the state of the industry and evaluating potential products for the market.

Q: Do you think Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are the future of education? Or of training? Do you think a MOOC will replace the Esri Authorized Teaching Program or other such vendor-specific programs?

A: I think MOOCs are part of the future of education. At this point it’s still the the wild west with MOOCs. Providers and students are still figuring out what they are for, how to teach and learn within the unique environment, and how to ensure a return on investment.

Esri’s Authorized Training Program is already being phased out. I think changes in student demand and corporate expectations related to timing, flexibility and cost caused its demise. I don’t think vendor-specific programs will go away; there’s a lot of money to be made in them! Vendor-penned and -taught courses and vendor certifications seem to carry extra weight with students and employers, whether they deserve it or not.

What will change education, in GIS and elsewhere, is interest in and support for competency-based learning. At the Esri Education GIS Conference Douglas Miskowiak of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point introduced what will likely be the first competency-based certificate in GIS.

Q: We define hipsters as people who think outside the box and often shun the mainstream (see visitor poll with 1106 responses). Since I launched GeoHipster, I learned that for many the term “hipster” has a derogatory connotation. Do you consider yourself a hipster? Do you think “hipster” is a pejorative term?

A: I don’t consider myself a hipster. I think the most important thing for those who do think outside the box is to do so not to shun the mainstream per se, but to follow one’s own path. If that makes me a hipster, so be it!

Q: You run ultramarathons, and play clarinet in a local band. Definitely not mainstream. Between your three jobs and these two activities, where do you find the time?

A: To me these activities are mainstream; they are what me and my friends do! I’ve been playing the clarinet since I was eight and running since I was 16.  As for finding the time… I’ve been doing them so long, and they are so important to me, I just fit them in.

That said, I do multitask, especially while running or driving. I’m always listening to tech and education podcasts to provide context for my work at Directions or listening to my band’s “practice CDs” to master those 5/8 and 7/8 tempos in our repertoire.

Q: Any future plans you would like to share? More teaching? More running? More writing? More of everything?

A: I would like to be more involved in teaching. We have to get beyond the classic GIS education involving watching a lecture, then doing a lab following cookbook-style instructions. Educators need to explore new ways to engage students whether face-to-face or online.


A: I want to thank you for inviting me to participate; it was fun.