🌐 GeoJupyter

💪 Enabling more researchers, educators, and learners to confidently engage with geospatial data

TODO: Show video instead?

When our community burned where was the satellite information?

…we are failing the people and causes that need us the most.

– Brianna R. Pagán, PhD

The status quo for working with publicly available geospatial data is that unfortunately, even very experienced practitioners struggle to leverage data about our planet when they need it the most.

Dr. Brianna Pagán is a member of the geospatial community that both Fernando and I have been fortunate to work with and learn from, and we were heartbroken to hear the story of her loss in the Palisades fire in January this year. Brianna wrote about her experience:

I should be able to do this. I have a PhD in Remote Sensing, I have built satellite data processing pipelines, I help manage one of the NASA satellite data centers, I teach courses on climate resilience, adaptation and geoinformatics. […] and yet the irony is that with all my experience I could not access the information I knew existed to help our community.

The status quo isn’t working, and folks in the geospatial community are deeply aware of this.

Approachability is important

• Science
  • Climate science
  • Biodiversity
  • Engineering
• Government & policy
  • Decision making
  • Transportation & urban planning
  • Disaster response & hazard management
• Industry
  • Agriculture
  • Logistics

Geospatial data: the “crude oil” of modern science - Image by GPT-4o

The status quo isn’t working, despite the fact that every domain needs geospatial data, especially organizations fighting for our environment. We think of geospatial data as the “crude oil” of modern science, and all of these domains face shared challenges around working with geospatial data.

Priorietary capture, vendor lock-in, monopoly

🛑 Once you’re in a proprietary system, the owners’ interest is inherently in keeping you there.

🔒 Proprietary systems are often not interoperable, by design, so you can not freely move your work.

🐛 Proprietary systems are often as buggy or buggier than open source alternatives.

ERROR 9999999
Something unexpected caused the tool to fail

🙃 Open science with closed software - AGU2023

A major problem in this space is proprietary capture. Proprietary capture is not just about the money, it’s a problem with how we do science.

Often cloud users are enticed with initial ease of use and low costs.

As cloud users continue building in a non-interoperable system, they accumulate inertia, making it harder to leave. Additionally, they often discover that they require more services than they initially assessed, and their costs increase unpredictably over time as it’s easier to buy one more service than it is to migrate.

Sometimes, the proprietary service shuts down, and existing science outputs cease to be reproducible.

And proprietary systems are often as buggy or buggier than open source alternatives, but human biases like “sunk cost” cause us to be more forgiving towards software we’ve paid for. Perhaps because of this reduced accountability to their users, proprietary tools also often offer less respectful error messages than those found in community-owned software. On screen is a common error message ArcGIS users experience.

Building a sustainable movement

Together, we can reimagine geospatial interactive computing to enable more researchers, educators, and learners to confidently engage with geospatial data.

GeoJupyter’s answer to the status quo is a sustainable and self-directing community.

Our community aims to employ user-centric design to combine the approachability and playfulness of desktop GIS tools, the flexibility and reproducibility of coding-driven GIS methods, and the collaborative and storytelling power of Jupyter.

GeoJupyter is…

• 100% open source, modular and interoperable.
• Led at Berkeley, with US and international partners who are eager
• Capable of:
  • Traditional GIS workloads.
  • Complex, code-driven workflows with earth/planetary data.
  • Leveraging the entire Scientific Python ecosystem.
• Cloud-native, can run anywhere (laptop, supercomputers, …)
• AI-ready
• Locally controlled, private, secure
• Vendor agnostic (including commercial AI)

Who is GeoJupyter?

QuantStack

Photos

Advisory committee

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Community champions?

Photos?

“Welcome committee”?

Many more community members not shown.

🙇 Special thank you to our many interviewees! 🙇

Demo GIF

TODO: A story for the demo. Continue with wildfire theme? Showcase working on a realistic problem with collaborative features.

Closing

I’ve spoken about how this project stands to benefit the world, and I’d like to close by sharing how this work has affected me personally. Some mornings, I have to remind myself that this project is real and that I’m being supported to work on it. This mission is important to me as a career geospatial data practitioner, and I feel privileged to be taking part in it, and to be working with these talented and special people. Thank you everyone for this wonderful opportunity to grow personally and professionally!