Ryan Kmetz is Research Director at IQSpatial. We are privileged to have his time in this episode. He talked with us about economic conditions faced by geospatial workers in the US. We reflected on the emergence of a protest movement, the No Kings march a couple of weekends ago. We observed how this has emerged in the context of very high cost of living, lack of wage growth, high costs of housing and education. Ryan is a useful guest here because he has in his family history a great great great grandfather who was involved in similar protest movement against a Russian czar and was sent to Siberia as punishment. In a hero's journey like so many who have come to America over the centuries, this man escaped prison to New York City where he sold newspapers on a street corner. A few generations later we have Ryan to tell this story and remind us that things happen in cycles.

By using a translation service you can read more about this family member here.

Ryan also told us about another family member who adds to the picture of unrest like we see now occurring in cycles, and how cynical political figures can exploit underprivileged groups in society to distract the population from the real causes of their issues. I recommend listening to find out more about that family figure.

Ryan then turned the mic toward me for a summary of what I have observed in my career from the perspective of exploitation of the poor and vulnerable. It was a chance to step through what I covered earlier in the year in 8 episodes starting here. We then used this material about cycles of exploitation of the vulnerable in society across the centuries, examples of how to deal with that from his family history and evidence of this pattern continuing in my career across the world to make the case for a new way of worker participation in the economy.

That new way is expanding democratic participation via owning shares. When you own shares you can vote on how a company is run. Through community organising (and we can use a prior guest Frank Romo for inspiration here) Ryan and I perceive there is an opportunity to assert ourselves in the industry to direct our work to favour the poor and marginalised.

I look forward to your own reflections on this matter and working with you to build up a force for justice here.

0:00 - Motivation for Microsoft to compete with Esri

1:20 - Who is Rakesh and data engineering services of SketchMyView

6:40 - Deploying a land and planning GIS for the UK government with Microsoft Synapse

22:25 - Is there a similarity between Synapse and Fabric?

26:26 - ACID compliance, delta files, lakehouses, bronze, silver, gold layers

35:18 - Apache Sedona in Fabric tutorial

57:20 - Why is it worth it to use Apache Sedona in Fabric?

1:00:44 - SedonaDB

Apache Sedona is a way for a regular Apache Spark using data analyst to acquire geospatial capabilities. With Sedona, if you know SQL, you know GIS. Rakesh Gupta is Principal Consultant at SketchMyView in London. He tells us about how to set up Apache Sedona in Microsoft Fabric in 2 lines of code. It was a privilege to have his time for this tutorial as he showed how easy it is to get up and running with a powerful, free spatial analysis system that leverages Apache Spark for scalable compute. He also touched in the new SedonaDB, released last month. This is a significant development for the geospatial economy because it is a database created with geospatial data as a first class citizen. This means we have our own database library that is only a pip install away:

pip install "apache-sedona[db]"

Something to consider as a replacement for DuckDB. More here and here.

Having started his career at USGS in 1980, Joe Francica is a veteran of the geospatial industry. He has a lot of experience in publishing, for example as Editor In Chief of (the now shuttered) Directions Mazagine…and he has been host of On Point with Korem.

Joe’s latest venture is www.LocationIntelligence.us. In my endless search for the world’s geospatial companies, I came across his Guide to the Location Intelligence Marketplace.

It contains his global list of over 1000 such companies. What a treasure trove! Joe has of course made his own effort to segment the market.

In Appendix 4, the report has over 100 venture capital and private equity firms that are versed in the task of assessing viability of geospatial business ideas.

A fascinating statistic - in the decade 2015-2025, Joe estimates that these firms have put $USD10 billion into geospatial ideas!

The timing of this episode is exquisite. Just when I was starting to think about starting a business in another industry, he has got me thinking again. If others have had success, why can’t I? And why can’t you?

Thanks Joe, for inspiring us and giving us this report as an expression of a tremendously successful career.

Arham Ansari confronts some challenges that most of us in the liberal democratic Western world do not. For example, in a small town near Delhi in northern India he only has 8-10hrs of power per day. There had also been a blackout the whole 3 days prior to the first day of recording the episode. India is not a wealthy country and he cannot afford to pay for expensive cloud computing/storage services to handle the large volumes of data required to train a flood prediction service on decades of records about 100+ parameters. This sharpens our appreciation of what he has achieved.

Arham is a civil engineering graduate applying for jobs in India’s public service. Whilst cramming for entrance exams, he has applied some of his knowledge to the risks of heat waves, floods and landslides. He has grouped those solutions under GeoRiskAI. I appreciated his candor on LinkedIn about learning the ropes. For example he admitted to making his flood predictions 24% less accurate after correcting the inputs. It is good to see openness about the learning process on LinkedIn where people are usually posting glitzy, perfect demos.

If you’re looking for a determined individual with the intellect required to make meaningful progress against the challenge of flood prediction, I recommend reaching out to him.

Frank Romo is an inspiring leader in geospatial. He runs several educational programs with school students across the country such as in The Bronx and recently St Louis. The focus of episode was therefore on how AI is being used to facilitate better outcomes for students. Frank gave examples from his community organising work such as urban planning and urban design renderings in The Bronx, gathering data for geospatial projects, and as a study aid by creating a quiz to help pass the Part 107 drone pilot license.

Frank is a joy to talk with. He is such a breath of fresh air because of the concerted efforts he makes to be approachable to all. He dresses the part. It is deliberately memorable and contrasts strongly with typical office dress. He wears a bandana in some of the photos with students. As such, he brings an atmosphere of fun, informality and through this it is easier to generate engagement with students and adults alike regarding what can often be a dry subject - drawing maps with databases.

In the first episode I recorded with him, he publicly displayed for the first time a dashboard about gun violence in The Bronx, created during a RomoGIS community organising effort. First episode.

Frank gives us a masterclass in community organising. He just so happens to have geospatial capability also. He provides several fantastic examples of geospatial outputs and acquisition of political power by communities that he has served.

The Bronx gun violence dashboard is here. We are once again seeing, in this subsequent episode with him, the first public display of another dashboard from further community organising efforts. This is a dashboard about A Decade of NYC Shootings (2015 - 2024). In Frank's own words:

"This project transforms ten years of NYPD shooting incident data into an interactive app that reveals where gun violence has occurred in New York City between the years of 2015 to 2024. The data was processed by RomoGIS with data sourced from the NYC Open Data Portal. This app is designed to inform community safety initiatives and policy interventions as part of RomoGIS' GIS For Good Initiative to end Gun Violence (www.gisforgood.com, https://gunviolence-romogis.hub.arcgis.com/)."

Frank is a leader. We are privileged to have his time.

Clemens Schotte is Senior Program Manager at Azure Maps. It is pronounced "Claymens SuHotte". Microsoft has a few geospatial offerings:

1. Microsoft Bing Maps is the most well known amongst the public. It is a web-based mapping service offering street maps, aerial imagery, and route planning for public and consumer-facing applications.

2. Microsoft Azure Maps is a cloud-based geospatial platform designed for developers to integrate real-time mapping, routing, and spatial analytics into enterprise and IoT applications. Code samples.

3. Microsoft Planetary Computer Pro was released 2 months ago. It provides global-scale environmental datasets and analytical tools, tailored for scientific research and sustainability use cases, with deep integration into cloud-native workflows.

   
   

It's nice to see a big tech monopolist has devoted some attention to our industry and is keeping up with the cloud native geospatial trend. Speaking of trends, we have a nice continuation here of the episode with Nelson Roque that kicked off the name change to Geospatial FM.

This is because of a recent blog post about model context protocol (MCP) by Clemens. Why has a brain researcher's comments about what cognition is made me excited about MCP servers? They enable tool use and extraction of up to date data from APIs. This enables the AI to operate on data beyond what it was trained on. As stated in the recording, this is sounding suspiciously like multimodal real time data feeds.

This is an aspect of organic organism cognition as described by Nelson. Something else that got my attention here is that Clemens mentioned introducing both short and long term memory, check the diagram here.

As such, we have a nice demonstration in front of us about the kind of progress a Big Tech company is making at the cutting edge of our species effort to duplicate our reasoning capacity.

Thanks Clemens!

Tue (Matt) Le-Quang is a Data Reporter at VnExpress.net. He spent time with us today analysing and mapping the upgrade of Vietnam's administrative boundaries.

Quoting from his publication VnExpress (Google Translate):

"After the reorganization of 34 provinces and cities, the number of commune-level administrative units in Vietnam decreased by 67%, from 10,035 to 3,321 units. Of which, Hanoi merged the most units with a reduction rate of more than 77%."

Tue has made a web app about this here. There has been a bit of debate over it the past half decade, such as this 2020 piece from VnExpress. Most recent English coverage I can find is this. The country used to have 63 provinces, now there will be 28 with 6 extra cities as their own areas, for a total of 34. A pertinent quote from that article speaks of large savings for the taxpayer:

"This restructuring is projected to reduce the workforce by approximately 250,000 people, including 130,000 officials, civil servants, and public employees, as well as 120,000 part-time workers at the commune level. The reform is expected to save more than VND190 trillion (US$7.3 billion) in the 2026–2030 period."

This brings up the work of Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson in Why Nations Fail and The Narrow Corridor.

Work for which they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics along with Simon Johnson. These books are riveting. They describe, as the title of the first says, how destruction of, or failure to maintain, institutions causes a nation to fail. The second book, The Narrow Corridor, is intended - in Daron's words from the second video above -

"…to provide a framework that is applicable across ages and across countries for thinking about what supports prosperity, what supports democracy and what supports liberty. The key idea ... is what supports robust participation from the people and we need the state to play a pro liberty, pro prosperity role. In particular to create inclusive markets which have the right legal system, provide equality of opportunity, the right regulations against the powerful actors."

It is so inspiring to see their work quoted by a citizen of, and reporter from, Vietnam in the midst of state action to navigate the country into The Narrow Corridor.

Thank you to Tue for giving us the privilege of this report and for all the diligence providing insight to the readers of VnExpress through geospatial apps. Clearly he is a talent, and a credit to the education system of Vietnam.