Over the summer I was asked to contribute a piece on what I thought the future of “Open Geospatial” would be in 2020, for the AGI (Association for Geographic Information) and their Foresight Study on the Geospatial Industry in 2020. This follows on from an earlier study in 2010, which attempted to predict what the state of the Geospatial Industry would be like in 2015, and that I also contributed to.

You can find a copy of the final study at the AGI website (when it’s launched, later this year). I’ve placed a copy of my contribution here on archaeogeek as a pdf.

I had what turned out to be an over-optimistic idea about crowd-sourcing some predictions, and asked on twitter and on the OSGeo Discuss Mailing List. Unfortunately, perhaps due to bad timing (everyone was off having fun at FOSS4G at the time), I had very few responses, however many thanks to Jody Garnett, who did take the time to come up with some ideas, and to my colleague Matt Walker who read through the final article. The rest is all mine, faults, mistakes, wrong ideas and all, so enjoy.