Openness and Collaboration as Strategic Choices
This talk is about why National Land Survey of Finland made a strategic decision to use open solutions and collaborate actively with other national mapping agencies, IT companies and OS communities. The talk will outline our experiences on open solutions and collaboration since then, as well as plans to strengthen the collaborative efforts going forward.
The National Land Survey of Finland has been an active user, and increasingly a developer, of Open Source solutions related to the agency's core geospatial duties for nearly two decades now. We also made a strategic decision in 2020 to leverage open source solutions for our major business critical IT systems.
Following the strategic decision, the National Land Survey of Finland started building a new topographic data production system on open source components in autumn 2020. Core components of the system include globally used geospatial OS products such as QGIS, PostgreSQL/PostGIS and QField for field work. Although not the main focus at the time of decision, the digital sovereignty aspect of the choice has proven even more valuable than we anticipated.
During spring 2025, the system was taken into full production use. Since then, the NLS has put even more focus on the collaborative aspects: how we collaborate with other authorities, the QGIS user community and with IT companies to ensure sustainability of the solution.
This talk will describe
- On what grounds we made the strategic decision of using open source
- What are our most recent experiences with the open solution and collaboration
- How we are organizing collaboration in Finland with other stakeholders
- How we are looking at engaging in further collaboration with open source communities to ensure sustainability of the solution
- How we perceive impact of using open solutions to digital sovereignty
- Most importantly, what benefits every public sector organization can gain by using and investing in open solutions.
Jani Kylmäaho has been working with geospatial data infrastructures, data production, collaboration and digitalization in various roles for 25 years. He has been involved in national and international collaboration and projects, working both for the public and private sector. During his career, Jani has contributed to extended use of open source geospatial solutions and collaboration in the Finnish public sector. Currently Jani is the Chief Digital Officer at National Land Survey of Finland.