Open source technologies for social enterprises.
As a social enterprise with a mission to unlock the potential of people and data to address local issues we are very interested in what open source geospatial technologies are available to us to achieve this. To find out more we participated in the first OSGeo symposium in Ireland in County Limerick.
Open source software first emerged in the 1980’s and has now matured to compete with the best GIS software on the market. We were intrigued to learn about the range of SME’s, research institutions and individuals using open source software across the island of Ireland.
An afternoon session learning how to use QGIS demonstrated not only the functionality of the software but also the generosity of the OSGeo community who gave up their time freely to teach this workshop.
As the day progressed we were convinced that open source technologies are the right choice for our emerging social enterprise. The software is freely available reducing the cost of developing our tech for good app and platform, not only this but it provides us with an opportunity to contribute to the hard working open source community as so tech for good solutions are available worldwide.
We’ll we following up here very soon with much more detail on our work with an open source software stack, and our experiences contributing to the community.
