Introducing CNG

In May last year, we announced the “Cloud-Native Geospatial Foundation” as an initiative to “help people adopt patterns and best practices for efficiently sharing Earth science data on the Internet using a cloud-native approach.”

Since then, we’ve done quite a bit.

We’ve published 29 blog posts and quickly attracted over 1,000 followers on X. We created a new Slack workspace which has over 400 members and 200 monthly active users. Combined with some of Radiant Earth’s previously created online channels, we now have a social media following of over 6,000 across X, LinkedIn, and Medium, and our quarterly newsletter has over 8,000 subscribers.

We have hosted in-person sprints for Zarr, STAC, and GeoParquet. We’ve been a part of the first SatCamp, the ESIP 2023 Summer and Winter Meeting Cloud Computing sessions, and convened a two-day workshop in Rwanda focused on improving access to air quality data throughout Africa. We’ve hosted a series of webinars to introduce people to cloud-native concepts, including a series made specifically for the Kenyan Space Agency. More virtual events are scheduled for this October and November.

Our team is rightfully proud of what we’ve accomplished, and we’ve learned a lot about our community, what they need from us, and what we have to offer. Today we are renaming the Cloud-Native Geospatial Foundation to the Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum (CNG). Here’s why:

There’s a clear need for vendor-agnostic sources of expertise and guidance on innovations in geospatial technology. Massive cloud providers, new startups, and the open-source community are all relentlessly creating new technologies and capabilities that benefit geospatial data users. We are uniquely positioned to provide a neutral forum in which geospatial data users can teach each other how to benefit from these advances.

In far too many instances, our community is segregated by industry or domain. CNG deliberately convenes community members from a diverse set of organizations including government agencies, academic institutions, international organizations, nonprofits, commercial enterprises, and startups. While we all work with geospatial data, we benefit from learning from peers who have different perspectives, priorities, constraints, and capabilities. This subtle name change will make it explicit that our primary role is as a convener and enabler of conversations for our community members.

Here’s how we’re going to do it:

We will continue to create as much free content as possible and put it on the open web. We will maintain the CNG blog and continue to produce webinars.

We are launching a paid membership program to directly raise funds from our community. This initiative will enable us to create free content that can engage a broader group of geospatial data users. Membership is designed to be affordable, accessible, and truly beneficial to our members. Membership tiers, their costs, and benefits are available at cloudnativegeo.org/join.

We have started an open Discourse forum to ensure that community discussions are available on the open Internet.

We are organizing our own conferences. A virtual conference will be held on November 13 this year and an in-person conference is planned for May 2025 somewhere in the US. We believe there’s a gap in the market for events of this type. Our goal is to make these conferences profitable, enabling us to offer subsidies or scholarships to welcome new members into our community. Look for opportunities to sponsor and exhibit at these events.

We are assembling an editorial board. We have learned there’s no easy definition of “cloud-native.” Instead of coming up with hardened definitions and rubrics, we will convene a board of leaders in our community to continually discuss ways we should pursue our mission of continually making data easier to access and use. Editorial board members will provide feedback on the agendas for our events and provide reviews of blog posts published on the CNG Blog.

(As an aside, the difficulty of defining “cloud-native” is part of the reason why we’ll usually refer to ourselves as CNG. The other reason is because Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum is simply too much of a mouthful.)

As before, Radiant Earth can provide fiscal sponsorship for initiatives important to our community, as we did with STAC. We will continue to collaborate with the Open Geospatial Consortium and any other standards bodies to identify emerging patterns and best practices that are candidates for standardization.

There’s much more we want to do (such as creating a job board, running regular surveys of our community, and formalizing our process of organizing development sprints) but the activities listed here are where we’re going to start.

If you’ve made it this far, please consider joining the CNG forum, either as an individual or for your organization. We can use your help to grow our community and unlock the potential of geospatial data.

Our blog is open source. You can suggest edits on GitHub.