[HN Gopher] Show HN: Gis.chat - a Geospatial Community
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Show HN: Gis.chat - a Geospatial Community
Hi folks! I'm excited to show you gis.chat, a geospatial chat
platform in both senses: a platform about geospatial topics and a
geospatial platform itself, referencing the location of our
communities. The setup is fairly simple and reproducible: a plain
Zulip instance and a homepage with geospatial search capabilities.
It seems almost trivial but it has some very nice features. I guess
you should be familiar with Zulips stream/topic model to follow
along (https://zulip.com/help/streams-and-topics). The core idea
is that there are city-specific streams (currently represented by a
pin), but there could just as well be streams about points of
interest, line geometries (e.g. a river) or polygons (e.g. national
park). - Every local stream can have the same topics, e.g.
"general", "news", "meetups", "jobs" etc. - With Zulip's search you
can either search for a particular topic, e.g. "news" in a local
stream or instead in all streams and have some kind of news feed of
the community with "topic:news" - Once more communities are added,
specific filters could be added, e.g. country-wise or by drawing
your own area of interest - Eventually, for the ones who like,
users could associate themselves with a local community in their
profile or add there main location so one could not only search for
the local communities but instead also for individuals There are
many nice features in Zulip's pipeline that would foster gis.chat:
- Further nesting of streams/topics - Semantic search If for
example Zulip would allow for saving coordinates (or better an
entire geometry) in the Postgres DB, with the help of PostGIS,
Zulip's search could allow for bounding boxes (or custom
geometries). Let me know if you have any kind of other ideas or
feedback!
Author : do-me
Score : 66 points
Date : 2023-05-23 06:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (gis.chat)
(TXT) w3m dump (gis.chat)
| nonethewiser wrote:
| I didn't know about Zulip stream/topics but heres my naive tl;dr
| after reading about it: Streams are like slack channels, topics
| belong to streams and have no analog in slack. They are
| essentially sub channels. Or tags/categories within the stream
| scope for your messages. Although threads (if people use them)
| arguably serve a similar purpose on slack.
|
| I wonder, is it possible to message on the base stream, or only
| topics? I feel like if you cant comment on the base stream you
| always need a general topic. Otherwise you're going to keep
| making new super-niche topics or make topics "off-topic." And
| what happens when discussion on one topic ventures towards some
| other topic? To bridge the gap it seems like I need to make a new
| message in the other topic and link in the original one.
|
| Generally speaking, I do not like forcing these structures on the
| "write" side. I had the same problem with Arc browser (with
| respect to types of tabs, workspaces). I don't want to have to
| essentially define some metadata about the action I want to
| perform. I have the same attitude towards taking notes. Generally
| speaking I'd rather have powerful tools to discover, re-organize
| as I see fit. I guess maybe this is less true in a messaging app
| though because you already have to choose a channel either way.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| I wanted to set up a similar chat for an online community.
|
| Do you host yourself or do you use the free version? What scares
| me is often the cost, especially since there is no way my users
| will pay the $6 a month and we are not making a profit on this
| project, so we can't pay for something too expensive.
|
| The idea is often to reuse our existing infrastructure and
| install a self-hosted chat.
|
| What discourages me every time I want to move forward with this
| project is that there is never a rough estimate of operating
| costs when it comes to self-hosted open source chat platforms.
|
| If you could share some pointers, I couldn't thank you enough!
| [deleted]
| joenot443 wrote:
| This seems neat! Your tagline encourages that you're open to
| everyone, not just engineers and data scientists. I think that's
| great, you'll find a much better engagement if you keep your
| funnel wide.
|
| My question though is how could I send this to any of my friends
| in GIS who are only semi-technical? You mention topics like
| "social sciences, climate change, urban planning" - the people in
| those areas have wildly different product expectations than you
| and I. I'm a FAANG engineer and have never heard of Zulip, and if
| I'm being honest, clicking around the interface was not
| especially inviting. It was more reminiscent of a bug tracker or
| internal docs tool than a social network :)
|
| I love the idea. I think that if you're serious about creating a
| community for GIS folks though, you may want to start talking to
| non-technical users and get their thoughts on the user experience
| and discoverability of the product. My guess is they'll have some
| suggestions which could really help your early growth.
| myself248 wrote:
| Oh, finally. There's plenty of GNSS/GIS folks lurking around the
| OpenStreetMap wiki and I've heard their telegram too but never
| explored it. There's some GNSS-but-not-GIS folks on the Time-Nuts
| mailing list. Galmon has its own little handful. There doesn't
| seem to be a good RTKLIB forum, which is weird.
|
| I hope this takes off and unites a whole bunch of little
| communities.
| mtmail wrote:
| https://mapstodon.space/ is the niche Mapstodon instance for
| GIS
| mvexel wrote:
| You may be interested in joining the Spatial Community slack if
| you haven't already. There's a self-invite link at
| https://thespatialcommunity.org. There's a ton of channels
| there spanning a range of GIS related interests.
| k82a wrote:
| Nice! I think it's a good initiative to organize more local types
| of meetups in the geospatial community. Geospatial experts are a
| bit too few and inbetween to bump into many of them on a regular
| day, so anything that gets these people together is a big win.
|
| As a side note to HN readers, geospatial is a super interesting
| application/ specialization that you might consider getting into
| if you're looking to add more meaning and purpose to your
| programming or tech career. You're often working to improve
| quality of life for someone, there are lots of interesting
| companies, people are generally super friendly and accessible,
| and there's a wealth of interesting problems and challenges to
| work on. My 2 cents!
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| I totally agree with your latter assessment. I wrote off
| software engineering as a career that I would deeply enjoy for
| a few years, went to become a scientist. I came back to
| software when I discovered geospatial; it's way fun.
| FactualActuals wrote:
| Due to the nature of my job, I interact with some of the more
| noteworthy geospatial experts on a weekly basis. These people
| will take any time of the day to explain to you all of the
| microscopic nuances about how any GNSS works.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| GIS seems interesting but it also doesnt seem like it pays
| well. Being niche isn't bad per-se but I would expect it to be
| more lucrative.
|
| In some ways it seems like GIS is to software engineering as
| business analyst is to data science. Not in nicheness, because
| business analyst isnt so niche. But doesn't pay as well and
| less programming, more GUI/business tools.
|
| Are these impressions wrong?
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| Not wrong necessarily, if "traditional GIS" is your chosen
| application of geospatial skills. (By "traditional GIS" I
| mean creating one-off analyses by interacting primarily with
| enterprise desktop/GUI tools like ArcGIS).
|
| But when combined with software engineering expertise,
| geospatial knowledge can be as lucrative as any other
| software job. (I am a geospatial software engineer.)
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Thanks for the insight. I gained a sliver of insight into
| GIS when trying to do some data analysis on lakes. I
| discovered that there is a lot to it. Its an interesting
| space, especially for those interested in geography or the
| outdoors.
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