Support Forums: The Value of a Community GIS

Support Forums: The Value of a Community

Support Forums: The Value of a Community GISLast week in our regular staff meeting, an interesting trend came to my attention.  Everyone seemed to agree that when it came to troubleshooting non-trivial issues with proprietary GIS technology, the support forums were not a particularly helpful resource.

Meanwhile, in my experience working with open source technologies, for instance the ExtJS library, I’ve found the community forums to be an incredibly helpful resource.  However, I think it would be a mistake to consider this trend to be a reflection on either of these communities themselves.  In my estimation, both of these communities are populated with perfectly competent developers; instead,  it is the transparency that open source provides that unleashes the true potential of a community of developers.  Open source forums are a place where developers connect and collaborate to solve shared problems.  On the other hand, I’ve found proprietary GIS technology forums to be a place where frustrated developers reluctantly find themselves commiserating over shared problems and hoping that someone at proprietary GIS technology will hear them and address their issue.

A colleague described it as falling into a dark hole, an apt description since it is generally accompanied by a sinking feeling: The experience of tracing an issue with some proprietary piece of software as far back as possible until you realize you’ve reached the point where the developers have blocked your access.  Frustrated, your only recourse is to take that sad trip into the support forums and hope that someone above hears your cries.

Alternatively, a trip into an open source forum community rarely brings on a sense of dread.  Instead you find yourself interacting with other developers, solving problems together, discussing technology, debating best practices.  The result is that you often learn something on top of what you came there for in the first place.  You are exposed to a variety of approaches.  Users can make concrete suggestions for changes to the technology based on an informed understanding, rather than vague requests.  The experience is invigorating rather than frustrating; it leaves you ready to rush back to the community upon encountering your next stumbling block.

So often a concern that people have with open source is the quality of the support.  I would argue that this is a bit of a misconception since so many open source technologies have great support providers, but instead consider this point: often times a community can be more valuable than a support team.  Any technology has a user community around it, and they wouldn’t be getting paid to work with these technologies if they weren’t competent.  Open source technology simply allows this community to provide support to each other in a way that they generally cannot with proprietary technologies.  This community support supplements and complements the work of support teams who are then better able to target their limited resources.  Steering developers clear of trips into dark holes is also a nice side benefit.

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