‘How Do You Get a Crew to Want to Get Off a Nuclear Sub… ‘ | May 16th 2008
To quote a line from Jack Ryan:
[imitating the Admiral] “The average Rooskie, son, don’t take a dump without a plan.” Wait a minute. We don’t have to figure out how to get the crew off the sub. He’s already done that, he would have had to. All we gotta do is figure out what he’s gonna do. So how’s he gonna get the crew of the sub. They have to want to get off. How do you get a crew to want to get off a submarine? How do you get a crew to want to get off a nuclear sub…
[eureka!]
Someone doesn’t have a plan, or they’re friggin’ geniuses. Think about this. There’s going to be Google data going to ESRI users and ESRI user data will be visible to the Google indexers. That leaves us with some unanswered questions:
- What is going to be the EULA going to look like on both sides?
- Will data made w/ gData be the user’s data, or Google or ESRI’s data if it’s exposed to Google’s web?
- Will the analysis layers be indexed by Google and will they own a copy?
- Will “Big Iron GIS” users even want to expose their data to Google and the web?
- Where’s Microsoft in this? ESRI + Microsoft makes for quick and easy GIS. Does (ESRI + Microsoft) * Google = Cloud Geoprocessing? Or, Google using Microsoft server and database platforms?
Getting back to ESRI users exposing data. Some of those users don’t let that stuff out of their command line. A friend was telling me today that cities in his region are ultra resistant to sharing data with other cities. So, how does Jack get his users to expose their data?
That’s what I really want to know.
The typical ESRI user “is an expert.” Or, at least in their own mind; and they typically don’t want to be usurped in anyway. Their Matrix gets turned off like that doll house by SAP. You may get a county to do something, but local sites are going to be a pain in the butt to turn onto the web by ESRI. Unless it’s ESRI’s responsibility in the pre-nup to bring in the “trusted interlocutors” to Google.
Something is askew.
On a side note: I spoke with Lisa Parks, who spoke yesterday about slippy map makers framing spatial media context, today. She has a grad student tracking the changes to the Google license agreement almost daily. That is because it changes almost daily.
“A friend was telling me today that cities in his region are ultra resistant to sharing data with other cities.”
This is extremely common. The problem is limited budgets and differing data quality standards in my experience. One organization will pay more for better quality and the other doesn’t sign off. It is amazingly wasteful in the overall picture.
The carrot will be two-fold as far as I can tell:
1. The search capabilities of Google for your own data. There is no general search in ESRI and it would be rather nice to have even for the “experts”.
2. Easy public access means more public interest means the potential for a bigger slice of the budget pie.
A stick I can think of:
1. For a lot of non-sensitive data some enterprising public group is just going to start tossing FOIA requests all over and getting the data anyway. Either fight them in court or save some money and release data.
Comment by Ben R. — May 16, 2008 @ 3:07 pm