The field of geospatial technology is full of people on a mission. It’s not just the achievement of a paycheck that motivates workers, it’s predominantly about doing good work that makes a difference.

I recently interviewed Paul Ramsey with OpenGeo about open source software and his company’s recently released OpenGeo stack of software. Here’s Ramsey on the motivations that drive his organization:

“We’ve formed ourselves as a social enterprise, meaning a business, but a business where the variable of maximization is not value of capital. In your traditional startup you dump some capital into it and you hope to make that pile of capital as big as possible. Our goal as a social enterprise is to take that starting capital and use it to grow as much social good as possible.

Our synthesis of how to do that best is to take our startup capital and work to be financially self sustaining. We’re working to build a business around open source tools that allow people to more democratically do mapping, but building a business with an aim to self sustain the development of that software so that we’re not tied to the vagaries of funding at the end of this process.”

Read the full interview for more insight into the status and prospects for open source geospatial tools here.

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