Spatialists, year one
One year ago today, Spatialists went live. I had a simple premise: Curate interesting geospatial news without the constraints (and lock-in!) of (fleeting1) social media platforms. Spatialists follows the POSSE paradigm which I deem advisable in this era of the internet: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. The tooling behind the site is entirely open-source.2
I didn’t give guarantees about frequency or quality (still don’t3). Spatialists is still an experiment in independent, interest-driven content curation.
A look back
The idea behind Spatialists is very modest: A microblog for geospatial news, not the long-form commentary style of (bygone, it seems, at least for now) early blogging days. No elaborate and long winding analysis, but a focus on giving pointers to interesting developments with brief context and sometimes critical reflection.
Since last February, I have published 164 posts4 covering many aspects of the geospatial industry from Swiss cadastral surveying strategies to #cloudnativegeo, from PostGIS and AI integration to experimental “vibe cartography” and vector tile server performance. The topics range from local news about developments in Switzerland to global, from deeply technical (for example, GeoParquet 2.0 specifications) to more high-level.
Some major currents
If I look back, I see several themes throughout the year, each revealing something about where our field is heading:
The cloud-native rising
The #cloudnative trend (think: GeoParquet, Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF, PMTiles), that is the ongoing transformation toward cloud-native geospatial formats and workflows, captured attention. Not because the technology is extra-ordinarily revolutionary, but because it signals that “geo” is being mainstreamed in the broader data engineering world.
Related developments reinforced this shift: STAC5 becoming an official OGC6 standard and even legacy tools adding, for example, GeoParquet support. A particularly bold claim came from Drew Breunig: namely that DuckDB might be the most important geospatial software of the last decade.
The underlying message: geospatial is dissolving into the general modern data stack (MDS). Bill Dollins’ recent “Post GIS revisited” essay published ten years after a seminal piece in the same veign also drove this point home, for me.
AI everywhere?
Of course, another important current was AI’s increasingly tangible presence in geospatial tools and work. (Hopefully) Not the hype-train, but actually valuable experimentation or even implementations.
For example, the GeoAI report for Switzerland by The Innovation Booster Articificial Intelligence provided a snapshot of how players are integrating AI into GIS applications. Geneva’s SITG7 tested autonomous GIS capabilities. And very recently, Brian Timoney explored how AI can both use PostGIS and be used from within PostGIS and Dan Shapiro proposed five maturity levels for AI use in software development. What emerges is a picture of a field trying to integrate a powerful but not yet perfected and not yet perfectly understood tool.
The Swiss ecosystem in motion
For a site with a declared Swiss perspective, the past year also offered a view of a national geospatial ecosystem in (further) development. The Swiss Geoinformation Strategy (SGS) defined or updated action plans and reflected on its progress. The cantons of Basel-Stadt and Zug launched new 3D geoportals, the canton of Aargau launched a modernized map viewer. And: The SWISSGEO platform progressed from concept to prototype. What made these developments interesting were less the technical aspects, but rather watching policy, infrastructure, and community interact.
Particularly innovative and refreshing initiatives, in my opionion, were not-just-geospatial but interdisciplinary – case in point: the real-time Earth observation pipeline for drought monitoring – and not governmental or even institutional but effected by driven and skilled individuals – for example:
- Fabian Rechsteiner (Vector tiles)
- Stephan Heuel (3D printing and cloud-native geo)
- David Oesch (AI cartography) and
- Oliver Wipfli (3D service)
It was exciting to see them build and share their ideas in public and to see the community respond with interest and support. I hope to see more of this in the future, and I hope that Spatialists can be a platform to share and amplify such work.
I’m sure, the Swiss story isn’t unique. Many regions probably have similar dynamics and ask themselves similar questions. At least, that is the belief which underpins my hope that Swiss content is met with interest also in other regions of the world. While I haven’t done any systematic analysis, this seems to be correct.
Reflecting …
Some of my impressions and learnings about the past year:
The microblog format feels more sustainable than a full-fledged blog. My hope is that the pointers and resources are inspiring to some people, help advance the discourse within our field and maybe inspire somebody to build on top of them.
When I draft an article, my script puts the publication time 15 minutes in the future. On some occasions this worked out. On many8 more occasions though I need some or quite some more time than that to write a post. Overall, I gauge that I invest maybe 1 to 2 hours per week on average, for choosing a topic, writing, summarizing, and finding and formatting images. Of course, I invest more time to read up on geospatial news and developments; that is not specific to this project, though, but something I have always done as part of my professional development.
It was very nice to see that a few people have approached me with ideas for posts, reached out with feedback or recommended Spatialists within their network. It was also fantastic to see some people sport one of the Spatialists stickers on their laptops!
Two people, Stephan Heuel and David Oesch, even contributed posts and thus broadened the perspective, which was a great pleasure!
Curating feels good: I get to read about and share interesting developments, guided by my (and hopefully the readers’) interests, and I get to reflect on them. Through this process, thematic coverage is of course idiosyncratic. I hope the mix of topics works not just for me.
… and asking for your input!
As Spatialists enters its second year, I’m interested in your thoughts:
What is missing? – Are there topics or perspectives that should get more attention? What’s being undercovered?
What is particularly useful? – Does the current format and mix of topics work for you? Are there adjacent topics worth covering?
What resonates with you? – Which posts or themes have you found most valuable? What made them stand out?
I’m particularly curious about how practitioners use (or would like to use) a resource like this. The original premise – independent, interest-driven curation – will remain, I think, but within that model, there is room to evolve.
Feel free to contact me through mail!
Thank you!
To:
- everyone who has read, shared, recommended, or discussed Spatialists.ch
- the occasional contributors who have shared their perspectives
- everybody who has shared feedback, ideas, or encouragement, and
- the many people creating the work that gets covered here:
Thank you so much!
Footnotes
For some years, I was quite active on Twitter, for example. No more. Besides shifting platform and other politics, there is also the normal enshittification cycle, which makes platforms unattractive as primary or exclusive outlets, in my opinion.↩︎
While I don’t host the site on GitHub for several reasons, that would be entirely possible. Everything (about this tooling! – not, like, in the world 🙂) can be had for free: GitHub account, GitHub actions (free tier), Mastodon account, LinkedIn account, Zapier (free tier). The latter is only for conveniently posting from the RSS feed to LinkedIn. But that could, of course, also be solved differently. Feel free to contact me if you’d like to learn more.↩︎
I would like to be able to dedicate more time to this endeavour, but I also have a day-job 🙂↩︎
The number of posts per month, from February 2025 to February 2026 is: 15 + 18 + 17 + 17 + 16 + 16 + 4 + 10 + 18 + 9 + 10 + 13 + 1 = 164. That’s a bit more than 3 posts per week, approximately 4 per week outside of holidays.↩︎
SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog↩︎
Open Geospatial Consortium↩︎
Système d’information du territoire à Genève↩︎
many!↩︎