“The geospatial community shares the ‘geospatial’ as passion or work (or even better, both!). Those who are hobbyist exists in the community with various levels of integration. Most hobbyist and geospatial devices consumers won’t probably actively participate to the community. Does that count them out? As for the geospatial professionals, they’re quite diverse too. The reason is simple, geospatial technologies are extremely varied themselves, from remote sensing to GIS to GPS to geobusiness to webmapping to geodatabase management to virtual globes, etc. Just GIS is a whole world in itself. So yes, the professional geospatial community is fragmented. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It just means the overarching ‘geospatial community’ is composed of many ‘subset’ communities.”
That is the answer given at Slashgeo by Satri, which goes about to explain further about who is part, or not part, of the community. While this is a wonderful attempt to describe what a community might be, I have to raise some questions, perhaps relevant to the discussion (depending on ones point of view).
community, then that results in a different community than the one A community can be defined in multiple ways, but social interaction and values cannot completely escape the equation. If one is to declare self-membership to the geospatialSatri declares above. If we consider anyone who has a passion or works with geospatial elements (be it data, analysis, storage, etc), then the community, since loosely defined, grows exponentially. But does such a community actually have any special properties? Is a community of people using computers as a passion or work have any meaning?
The other issue to be raised is whether a geospatial community is an exclusive grouping. Are people in the geospatial community part of the social sciences community? Can one have multiple memberships to multiple communities, or even yet, partial memberships? If one is a member of the social sciences community, can and should that person also be a member of the geospatial communities?
More interestingly, is this geospatial community simply a characterization of people? A simple way to classify things based on some properties they have?
While I can offer no answer to this questions myself, I can argue that a community that is not self-defined and recognized cannot be a community, but rather a characterization given by a third party to serve their purposes (or values).
As “geospatial professionals” (whatever that term may mean), we may be able to better define the community we belong and recognize our common geospatial interests. But this may not be the case for most geospatial professionals that fail to realize the geospatial element in their line of work to a degree that requires a new term, or even a community, for them. Take into consideration public health professionals, whose work involves a great degree of geospatial elements, yet they do not recognize themselves as geospatial professionals (perhaps the term public health official/researcher is more prestigious?). Or to stretch this even further, take the number of people that use Google Earth to identify where to drive to, or simply just “browsing the Earth”. Are these people part of the geospatial community? If the answer to the above is yes, then the answer of who is in the geospatial community is all of the world, as humans interact with space constantly, and as such, make spatial decisions using technologies available to them daily.
No related points found for this point.
