Open note to Mike Byrne (@Byrne_Tweets), GIO of the FCC in response to his query about my impressions on his latest blog posting found at: http://www.fcc.gov/blog/opening-hood%E2%80%94and-code%E2%80%94-behind-fccgovmaps
- Loved the posting. I’m all for exposing and touting what you’re doing and its totally refreshing to see some new approaches and not more of the same old, same old.
- Learned some new things as I hadn’t previously realized about the National Broadband Map including the Drupal connection.
- Your post highlights that a big part of the new open source software (OSS) ecosystem is that you need to make choices and run with them. Some may ask “why Drupal”, others “why MapBox/TileMill”. The answer is simple: because they work and are cost effective. But as you know there are many other ways that you could have approached this (both with OSS and/or Esri).
- I quickly asked my partner Peter, our lead on software architecture, what he thought of Drupal and he said that he’d heard good things about it. We’ve not gotten into it, and extending it, partly because of its PHP roots. As a small shop, we’ve had to make some choices and we’ve been .NET/ASP.NET for a long while and its served us well. In a similar situation, we’ve made the choice to gravitate towards jQuery as our preferred JavaScript framework – fully knowing there are others like Dojo that others prefer.
- I understand that you must have some restrictions on what you can post vis a vis costs, cost effectiveness, and the vendors you use, but I imagine I'm not alone in wondering about the fiscal dimensions of what you're doing (e.g., “how much do you pay annually for MapBox”).
- One thing that you don’t discuss and might be a good topic for another post is your backend data management. All this quick, cool mapping stuff happens because you have your data management act together. Spinning out new tile sets quickly and flexibly only happens if all the geometry and attributes are at your fingertips and well organized. As we know, your data sets are nationwide and extensive and you’ve clearly got a good data management solution. All this other cool stuff doesn’t happen w/o that foundation. That foundation is worth mentioning too.
That’s my $.02. Most of all, keep up the good work.
You’ve found a great, novel (for Feds) solution that works for FCC and you’re
telling people all about it, how it works, and are encouraging us to
“plug-in”. To me, that’s what the modern Federal geospatial playbook
should be all about, and that’s why we’ve included FCC as an important use case
in our ongoing strategic planing for Federal agencies and states.
@MT_AppGeo
