Recently I sat down to train some local government transport planners in some ArcView based software we wrote. Actually, most of the time was training them in ArcView 8 because they had little GIS experience.
You could see their eyes light up when they started to realise what they could do with it. "Hey, we could plot vandalism incidents on bus shelters! We could look for patterns in our accident reports!" Forget our code for now - just having mapping software on their desks was a revelation.
True, this wasn't in the most high-tech part of Britain, but I'm convinced there is a huge market for simple GIS that is as affordable as Word and Excel, and can just be on those people's desks.
Many companies and local authorities still have "GIS teams" that are off in some other office and charge a lot of money per map. It's like an old Computing Bureau again.
Open Source is not naturally accessible to these people. But the huge untapped market really is there. Further, they really need standards and interoperability - and OSS is much more likely to deliver this in *reality* than commercial vendors. (Ask yourself why ArcGIS 8 can't natively read MapInfo format files. They have a fully modular system for dealing with different formats. How hard can it be?)
This was my own experience as a volunteer with an NGO overseas. For example, email is _vital_ to aid work today. Often the postal and long-distance telephone services are so bad that email is not just the best, but the only link to the outside world.
Keeping the 'net link up... getting an old printer to keep going... fixing a computer that would have been thrown out long ago in the corporate world. These are huge needs for many NGOs, but you often won't see it listed on their brochure.
I used doc++ for a small C (not ++!) library recently. It really needed equation support in both printed and HTML docs. Doc++ was the only system I found to provide this.
Overall I was happy with it. My tips would be:
- subscribe to the developers list even as a non-developer. Bugs are introduced, and fixed, on a frequent basis.
- automake targets for this kind of thing are still mildly tricky. That's not doc++'s fault.
- the TeX layout looks pretty good, but tinkering with it requires at least a lesser TeX wizard.
- the code uses multiple state machines written using flex and C++. Check it out, it's pretty funky.
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Recently I sat down to train some local government transport planners in some ArcView based software we wrote. Actually, most of the time was training them in ArcView 8 because they had little GIS experience.
You could see their eyes light up when they started to realise what they could do with it. "Hey, we could plot vandalism incidents on bus shelters! We could look for patterns in our accident reports!" Forget our code for now - just having mapping software on their desks was a revelation.
True, this wasn't in the most high-tech part of Britain, but I'm convinced there is a huge market for simple GIS that is as affordable as Word and Excel, and can just be on those people's desks.
Many companies and local authorities still have "GIS teams" that are off in some other office and charge a lot of money per map. It's like an old Computing Bureau again.
Open Source is not naturally accessible to these people. But the huge untapped market really is there. Further, they really need standards and interoperability - and OSS is much more likely to deliver this in *reality* than commercial vendors. (Ask yourself why ArcGIS 8 can't natively read MapInfo format files. They have a fully modular system for dealing with different formats. How hard can it be?)
This was my own experience as a volunteer with an NGO overseas. For example, email is _vital_ to aid work today. Often the postal and long-distance telephone services are so bad that email is not just the best, but the only link to the outside world.
... getting an old printer to keep going ... fixing a computer that would have been thrown out long ago in the corporate world. These are huge needs for many NGOs, but you often won't see it listed on their brochure.
Keeping the 'net link up
I used doc++ for a small C (not ++!) library recently. It really needed equation support in both printed and HTML docs. Doc++ was the only system I found to provide this.
Overall I was happy with it. My tips would be:
- subscribe to the developers list even as a non-developer. Bugs are introduced, and fixed, on a frequent basis.
- automake targets for this kind of thing are still mildly tricky. That's not doc++'s fault.
- the TeX layout looks pretty good, but tinkering with it requires at least a lesser TeX wizard.
- the code uses multiple state machines written using flex and C++. Check it out, it's pretty funky.