All over the world, organizations are increasingly considering the adoption of open source software and open data. In the geospatial domain, this is no different, and the last few decades have seen significant advances in this regard. We review the current state of open source geospatial software, focusing on the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) software ecosystem and its communities, as well as three kinds of open geospatial data (collaboratively contributed, authoritative and scientific). The current state confirms that openness has changed the way in which geospatial data are collected, processed, analyzed, and visualized. A perspective on future developments, informed by responses from professionals in key organizations in the global geospatial community, suggests that open source geospatial software and open geospatial data are likely to have an even more profound impact in the future.

Geospatial information and technologies are widely used in South Africa, initially mostly with proprietary software but today, mature, open source alternatives such as QGIS are available. We wanted to find out if and why South African users accepted QGIS, globally the most widely used free and open source GIS. We adapted the extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model to test several hypotheses regarding the acceptance and use of QGIS in South Africa. 205 registered members of the Geo‐Information Society of South Africa completed a structured questionnaire. Results show that habit has the most significant influence on behavioural intention to use QGIS, followed by facilitating conditions, price value and social influence. Performance expectancy, effort expectancy, hedonic motivation and access to source code played no significant role. The findings show that adoption of QGIS in South Africa is not primarily influenced by benefits attributed to open source software, such as cost benefits, customizability, improved reliability, quality and security. The results are useful for developers of any GIS product and for choosing a GIS product for an organization, because they provide insight into the behavioural intentions of users.

YouthMappers is a global network of student chapters actively engaged in collaborative mapping efforts, such as OpenStreetMap mapathons. Many questions have been raised about the impact of mapathons on open map data and on the participating mappers. For example, how can the social gathering and event format encourage productivity and quality, while also contributing to community building? Because YouthMappers chapters regularly host mapathons, there are frequent opportunities to investigate the impact of mapathons. In this paper, three universities involved in the YouthMappers network, located in Europe, North America and Africa, describe how mapathons are conducted at their respective universities. Incorporating mapathons into the curriculum encourages students to contribute much-needed open geospatial data for humanitarian projects. At the same time, students get practical experience in data capturing with open source tools and awareness is raised of humanitarian challenges in other parts of the world, thus nurturing socially engaged citizens for the future. The experiences at the three universities are diverse and richly contextual to the specific character of the campus and its students. These differences underscore the challenge of a common means to formally assess the impact of such events in general. Based on this exploratory research, three themes for assessing the impact of mapathons are proposed: the volume and quality of open geographic data produced during mapathons; the social and personal growth of the students attending the mapathons; and the changes in university programs and curricula introduced as a result of the mapathons.

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An intelligent geoportal orchestrates (automatically coordinate) web services to prepare, discover and present information to the user. Implementations of web service standards by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and ISO/TC 211, Geographic information/Geomatics, such as, the Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS) and Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD) enable the display of spatial data in a geoportal. Ultimately, our goal is to intelligently orchestrate web services to produce thematic maps. As a first step towards our ultimate goal, in this article, we present the results of experiments with the orchestration of OGC web services to produce thematic maps. Our goal here was to evaluate whether orchestrating OGC web services can produce thematic maps. The results prove that this is possible, but show that there is customised functionality that has to be wrapped into WPSs. This poses a challenge to on the fly intelligent orchestration, which is required in an intelligent geoportal.