The last year of my university years was a horrible time. You need money; you studied business; you actually wanted to be an actor, why did you study business; you still have some dignity salted with ego so that you don't wanna get melted into a corporate; you think maybe academia is the way; you think who is gonna afford another investment for studying something nobody cares anymore and there are already millions "copy" of you out there; you search for something meaningful in life for yourself although you know very little about yourself; you really need money.
Amidst this chaotic early youth mantra, I find myself in an agri-tech startup in İstanbul where I can at least afford to live. After my first dearest task of researching marijuana legalization, somehow, I ended up researching how to classify satellite imagery to detect tomato fields. An economist guy from my university, Sinan, showed me how he visualizes an NDVI band literally in Excel by adjusting cells and giving them numbers and colors accordingly. Luckily, we got Betül doing her masters in geomatics at that time, and she said: "Look kids..." while we were looking with an empty face and started to explain the business here.
After getting the basics from Betül, I did what I've been doing since I was 7 years old: I started to surf the internet alone. My walk started into this clergy of people sharing everything they know with me. Contacted many people on Linkedin, watched Youtube videos, read blogs, never understood PyQGIS, hired by a guy among those people and moved to Berlin, where I started acting after years, attended FOSS4Gs, saw many in-person that I was stalking online, met randomly with people from Yer Çizenler & HOT during a disaster relief, felt some meaning, felt in my nerves deeply that I'm not alone in this shapeless Earth, at least not always.
This is the space for the talk “A Layperson Walks into Open Geospatial Clergy” at Mostar, FOSS4GE 2025. The recording will hopefully be available here. If you're new to free and open geospatial data, this information may be useful to you. If not, you’re welcome to ask questions or randomly complain in issues or discussions. Talk not only to AI, but also to your Self — just start somewhere.
When the wind blows directly on your face or a whistle tickles your ears, do you know what just happened? The Earth rotates on its axis, and things shine as it turns. The leaves might have some idea, or the clouds might lend you a soft mattress to tell the myths of the universe. Some people share stories and tricks; others listen or add to them. Many never even hear these stories, but some won’t stop telling them.
Free and Open Geospatial Clergy might be another story about things happening — maybe true, maybe not. The clergy have helped me greatly during my self-learning process, and they continue to do so. I wanted to collect some materials along the way that helped me, and maybe will help you as well. I forgot to stress the word "Free" in the talk; looking back, it is a significant difference and should have been "Layperson walk into Free and Open Geospatial Clergy". Anyways, we live between the lines of the regrets and actualizations, ignorance and wisdom, so on and so forth. The talk was also just a talk. As I tried to stress in the talk, I'm an average person.
People in the clergy, while being open, also helped me to be free. Free from the reality forcibly constructed around me. Since my childhood, whenever I got stuck in this life questioning myself, my thoughts, my being, my worth, and all other depressive stuff, I scrolled back to the internet and found people like me. I've been scrolling through internet subcultures: forums, underground rap recordings, collaborative hypertext dictionaries specific to Türkiye such as inci or eksi, and of course, later Twitter and Youtube when they were not filled with bullshits.
At the time of my youth mantra of destructive thoughts and worries, when I was struggling to find my way in this career hell after the graduation (which I still struggle with), I connected with these people's materials and discovered many different ways of living. Also, during my career hell, they keep showing up. They are really interesting people.
It’s best to ask them yourself. In my experience, they’re good people, though “good” is a topic for a lengthy discussion. They’re passionate about what they do, often without knowing why. They have ideas and questions and keep searching until they burn out. They hold strong opinions about how people should organize, behave, and work, and often disagree with one another. They discuss, and sometimes they even decide things.
As far as I can tell, they’re human. Not only the mystical geospatial, but exploring movements like Free Software can help you understand a bit of the spirit here. Freedom itself is a long story — for that, maybe check the history of politics, science, and for sure, philosophy. Also, psychology, mythology, anthropology, and, I don't know, economics? There was one more thing. It is a huge topic; I think about it sometimes, randomly, in the toilet or during the shower. Ah, and of course, geography.
If you are like I used to be, quite blank around here, and acknowledging that, it may be good to check some fundamentals from courses. Combining them with some practices, like solving a problem or a case, helped me. However, this is pretty generic advice that you can get everywhere. You may also need motivation to build, which can be hard. What motivated me at that time is a mystery to me. I believe it is more than just working on something; it's about internalizing and becoming what you do. It is a different kind of living experience.
I'm still searching for answers to understand why I do certain things. I'm not sure if these questions can be answered by the same person who is acting. When I analyzed myself, I observed that the main motivation that carried me to build a character around certain things, and it was geospatial at that point in my life. Related to our topic here, I mostly searched to become one of the mellow people out there sharing stuff for free and freely. So, I started just by imitating.
When we talk about learning, we are primarily referring to reaching a point where we have acquired the knowledge we were trying to learn. If we wanna solve the learning puzzle with questions: "How to learn?", "Where to start learning?", "What to learn?" pondering on the question of "What is knowledge?" is interestingly useful. Addressing questions like "What type of knowledge am I trying to get here?" was helpful to me. I found that the cognitive science community has nice answers, such as Four Kinds of Knowing.
I have always followed the general advice from thousands of years: never assume that you have finished something in life.
If you are not familiar with computer science basics, you may get many concepts wrong. For about 6 months, I thought production code was something related to the factory as I studied business and some operational domains. You probably don't know many concepts and words, or at worst, that you even misinterpret them. It is really wise to check a word, providing the context you are using, such as GIS, to make your research or learning process easier. Knowing that you don't know is the cure, as Socrates taught, as Plato reported. Materials with fundamentals helped me to understand what these people are referring to, both for computer science and geospatial topics.
You probably don't know what a coordinate really means in this context. I assume you are familiar with Descartes' innovation of Cartesian coordinates and some geometric stuff. It is not very different here, but a bit different. You need to become familiar with concepts such as Coordinate Reference Systems, Map Projections, Vector Data, Raster Data, Affine Transformation, and the basics of what GPS is. It is not rocket science; just prioritize learning these fundamental concepts, which can be found in courses and many YouTube videos, such as here.
You might find these useful to explore. You can also point them to GPT models — they might uncover something better with these. Monks suggest asking for references for everything you hear in this life. After that, it's up to luck or agency to utilize the information.
Contemplate these counsels — maybe while you're in the toilet.
- Free Software Foundation - One of the pioneer community drived the history of computer science in general.
- Open Geospatial Foundation – The organization. Many free and open projects are hosted under OSGeo.
- OpenStreetMap Foundation – You probably think, "There must be a map," and yes, it’s already in OSM.
- Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team – A separate organization focused on humanitarian work.
- Open Geo Hub – Great summer school programs, freely accessible.
- The Group on Earth Observations - Many subdivisions on use cases.
- European Space Agency - Enabled a huge market for the citizens of the Earth. Check out the Copernicus Program.
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration - They are not only into space but to the Earth as well.
- Spatial Data Science with R – Great introduction for the mathematically inclined.
- Geocomputation with R – Solid foundation if you plan to scale your analysis.
- Geocomputation with Python – I haven’t checked it, but you get the idea.
- Introduction to GIS
- Introduction to Remote Sensing
- Geomindz: Introduction to GIS I – Fundamentals and Mapping
- Geomindz: Introduction to GIS II – Vector Data Model
- Geomindz: Introduction to GIS III – Raster Data Model
- Digital Image Processing of Remote Sensing Data
- Understanding and Using SAR Data – Training 2020
- Introduction to Geostatistics
- Introduction to GIS Programming – Epical person.
- Geographic Software Design – Great for understanding CI/CD tooling in geo-python.
- OpenGeoHub Summer School – Deep material on GIS and Remote Sensing use cases.
- Spatial Ecology – A treasure trove for large dataset computation.
- OsGeoLive – A showcase of the full free geospatial tech stack.
- Open Geospatial Solutions – Experience Qiusheng Wu’s work.
- Awesome Geospatial Companies
- Awesome Satellite Imagery Datasets
- Awesome GIS
- Geospatial Glossary
- FOSS4G Academy
Search everything with "GIS" keyword, you'll find something. Also search it as "free and open", you'll be around here.
- OsmAnd or Organic Maps - Popular apps you can interact with OpenStreetMap on your mobile.
- Every Door - To update OSM attributes quickly.
- Mapillary - For street-level imagery. Suspicious because it is from Meta but good people work on it.
- QGIS & QGIS Tutorial
- GDAL - You also have it in QGIS - when you go advance, you'll need to get your hands dirty here.
- GRASS - You also have it in QGIS - when you wanna go really large scale, you'll need to get your hands dirty here.
- OTB - You can add it to QGIS like here.
- SAGA - You can add it to QGIS like here.
- SNAP - Useful for Sentinel1 SAR Processing.
- POSTGIS - The spatial database that is actually enough for everything but most efficient for the tables.
- FOSS4G - Where the clergy worship on live.
- Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum
- I won't let you pay me for my open source - The deep discussion.
- What does Overture Maps mean for OpenStreetMap and the future of open source mapping? - Nice to be aware of these delicate lines between the free and open source differences.
- Start your Geospatial Career - Great advices from my friend.
- Death of an Open Source Business Model - A pessimistic view on the open source business model, which I don't agree with fully.
- How to Change an Industry? - Aaa okay, it is one of us just critically thinking.
- GIS StackExchange – Ask reproducible questions and you’ll likely get good answers.
- OpenStreetMap Community Forum - Hot discussions you'll have.
- Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team Slack Channel - If you are interested in humanitarian issues, which are quite related to you as you are human, join here.
There is a lot of stuff around. I like these nowadays.
There aren't more chapters.
Made with 🫀 in Berlin.