Dear Alan,
I want to congratulate Alasdair, you and UCL for this initiative. It
will certainly pay-off in the medium / long term as UCL and many close
partners have strong PhDs programmes. What I foresee is that creative
people such as Andres Sevtsuk will have a clear option of implementing
new modules / ideas into DepthMap instead of jumping into ArcGIS /
other commercial packages.
About the risk of misuse, I had the experience of distributing a
version of Mindwalk between 2005 and 2010 (I took-off the website
because I could no longer handle the amount of requests for support -
questions, etc.). From that I must say the most practitioners tend to
use the tools only to give some extra input to their projects - and
most of them had formal training before. Very few people were
interested in using Mindwalk to offer "consulting services" (for those
I denied the licences).
The biggest misuse, surprisingly, was academic. Many students and even
professors who did not have a formal training in space syntax decided
that they could do by themselves just with the software and a bunch of
papers. The result was terrible. This is partly related with all
arguments Noah exposed before, in particular with how "difficult" is
our literature for most people outside the field (and in particular,
people who is used to read Jane Jacobs, etc.)
I certainly welcome the initiative.
Best Regards,
Lucas Figueiredo
On 16 September 2011 05:09, Penn, Alan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Dear All,
> yes, this is true. We are in the process of setting up the open source
> developer community, and were about to announce this move ahead of the
> Santiago Symposium, but Renato got there first!
> There have for a long time been calls of exactly Danny's kind, but to be
> honest we have been caught in a dilemma between opening the commercial use
> of the tools (risking their poor application and misuse), and the clear
> benefits of getting the tools into wider use in design.
> Our decision to take the risk at this point is driven mainly by Alasdair's
> wish to open source the development and so to bering many more developers
> into actively experimenting with and pushing forward the tools and measures.
> I would foresee one outcome would be that people would begin to build the
> toolset directly into third party CAD and GIS software (including ArcGIS,
> but hopefully also other OS GIS), as well as statistical and other packages.
> As a part of this initiative we will also be developing training and
> support. UCL/Space Syntax Limited are developing an Online Training Platform
> and in this way aiming to mitigate the risk of poor use. Again this should
> be a space syntax community project.
> Look out for a formal call for joining the community in the near future, and
> we will try to organise some kind of event to discuss this at the Symposium,
> so anyone with an interest in open source development would be most welcome
> to join us there.
> All the best,
> Alan
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