Step 3. Profit!
The dust is slowly settling after the AGI Geocommunity event with lots of neo/paleo love going on, and cries of 'why can't we all just get along?'
Nonsense. I'm of the opinion that although it's true to say we're all 'doing geography' there are some profound differences in the cultures of the two groups and rather than bury them we should be exploring and investigating them. Incidentally, I speak as someone who has got a well thumbed hardcopy of Snyder's 'Map Projections: A Working Manual' and has served my time writing Avenue and MapBasic applications. Anyhow, back to Geocommunity... 'Yes, but how do you make money out of this?' was the first question put to Andrew Turner after his keynote 'How Neogeography Killed GIS'? The general view of the paleo community is that the neos are just a bunch of freeloading cheapskates. In one way it was a banal question (the answer of course being 'we sell consultancy and development services - same as everyone else'). But as the conference unfolded it became a touchstone for what I was actually seeing.The various paleo-presentations I sat in on were given by the public records office, local councils, university and government departments. Mostly they were very interesting. None of them though were 'making money out of it'. Even Arup's presentation on measuring perceptions of space was funded, in part at least, by the National Lottery. The question of profit was never even mentioned.So who is 'making money out of it'? Yup, it's the neos. The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in companies such as like Cloudmate, Itoworld, GeoCommons, Dopplr. These are the people innovating, building the future, 'making money out of it'.Yes, there is a distinct divide between the paleo- and neo-geographers. It was plainly visible at the AGI Geocommunity conference, but it's not just about t-shirts vs suits, whether you used a notepad or tweeted, or which tools you use. The divide is rooted in those who are sitting in safe jobs and wait for others to deliver the big ideas and those who are pushing boundaries, exploring new ways of using geography, who are innovating for fun and profit.
