How Simplicity Will Save GIS

Vladimir Agafonkin, Mapbox
Wednesday 10:00 - 11:00
Session 1, Track 0, Slot 1

It’s 2014 — we have consumer robots and electric cars, private spacecraft, planet colonization projects, and the Higgs Boson is confirmed, but GIS software is still a mess. You might be able to make sense of it all if you’re a GIS specialist with an academic background, but other creative individuals — designers, developers, tinkerers of all kinds, each with a vision and desire to create meaningful and beautiful maps and visualizations — are constantly losing battles against bloat, clutter, and complexity.

How do we reverse this GIS entropy? What does it take to turn complex technology into something that anyone can use and contribute to? An attempt to answer by the creator of Leaflet, a simple JS library that changed the world of online maps forever.