No one would be surprised to know that there are challenges to making a national geospatial agenda happen. When I think across the many conversations, presentations and discussions I’ve been a part of, it often comes back to one thing – an issue that can be summed up in one line. It’s what I’m characterizing as the NZ Geospatial Challenge:
“We’ve been talking about that for 10 years.”
It’s amazing how often that line is given life; it’s such a consistent assessment of the state of things in New Zealand, across all sectors and levels.
So if we accept that this is our “issue,” we need to solve it. To do that we need to address three things:
Maybe it’s best to describe firstly what it doesn’t mean: It doesn’t mean we don’t understand the problems, the challenges, even the solutions. We do. We are extraordinarily consistent in our understanding and our joined up purpose across all sectors.
That’s very important and a necessary first step. But articulation is not enough. We can get ourselves, more significantly as a unified group, to that precipice. But we hesitate, again as a group, to take that first significant step towards achieving. There are those individuals and organizations doing this already, to be sure: the innovators and early adopters. And I want to stress that and acknowledge those who are already taking that step and implementing solutions.
But to succeed as a country we need to do these things in numbers. We need that critical mass of participants (the peak of the Rogers Curve – the early and late majority) fully committed and participating.
To be fair, it can never be just about or by us. We need to bring others along: the decision-makers, the funders; supervisors, managers, CE’s, councils, politicians, Ministers.
If its hard for us, the knowledgeable, the converted, to take that step into unknown territory, be aware of just how much harder that is for those without our level of understanding of the value of geospatial. It is even darker territory for them, into which they must place their trust, their money, in many cases their reputations.
