Ian Schuler is the CEO of Development Seed — the team behind a lot of the open source tooling that quietly holds up the geospatial world. He’s been at the helm for over a decade, and in this conversation, we dig into what he calls the great retooling: the idea that cloud-native geospatial is about...

What is Earth observation, really — and why, after fifty years of satellite imagery, is it still not “mainstream”? In this episode, I’m joined by Aravind Ravichandran, founder of TerraWatch, an independent research and advisory firm focused entirely on Earth observation. Aravind writes the TerraWatch newsletter, runs the EO Summit, and spends his time thinking...

Ryan Shields has one of the most interesting careers in geospatial — from remote sensing for conservation in the Caribbean, to disaster response data engineering with FEMA, to his current role turning spatial data into animation assets for Johnny Harris’s YouTube channel at New Press. In this episode, Ryan counts down the 10 tools he’s...

Nadine Alameh is back — former CEO of the Open Geospatial Consortium, and now CEO and co-founder of Lunate AI, a six-month-old company sitting right at the messy intersection of geospatial and AI. In this conversation, Nadine breaks down the three types of clients she’s seeing right now: government agencies standing at the edge of...

What happens when you put professional-grade aerial mapping in the hands of the people who actually live in the places being mapped? In this episode, I’m joined by Rebecca Firth, Executive Director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) — a global community of around 750,000 people building free and open-source maps in the places that...

This episode examines the Common Space initiative, a non-profit project dedicated to building and launching high-resolution optical satellites designed specifically for humanitarian purposes, such as aiding populations at risk from climate events and conflict. Although there are over a thousand Earth observation satellites currently in orbit, high-resolution imagery remains largely inaccessible to humanitarians, journalists, and...

I’ve been playing around with a lot of large language models lately, and it is absolutely fascinating to watch them work. But what happens when you bring that directly into QGIS? Right now, AI in the geospatial industry is a lot like a fast, enthusiastic new intern, incredibly helpful, and sometimes completely wrong, but improving...

Geospatial Product Swiss Army Knife 1. The “Build It and They Won’t Come” Trap We have all seen it: a talented geospatial professional spends months—perhaps years—perfecting a technically sophisticated web map or a niche data service, only to release it to a deafening silence. In our industry, the “build it and they will come” philosophy...

Why Machine-Writing Code is the Best (and Most Dangerous) Thing for Geospatial: The current discourse surrounding AI coding is nothing if not polarized. On one side, the technofuturists urge us to throw away our keyboards; on the other, skeptics dismiss Large Language Models (LLMs) as little more than “fancy autocomplete” that will never replace a...

How can you accurately aggregate and compare point-based data from different parts of the world? When analyzing crime rates, population, or environmental factors, how do you divide the entire globe into equal, comparable units for analysis? For data scientists and geospatial analysts, these are fundamental challenges. The solution lies in a powerful class of tools...