11-19, 15:55–16:00 (Pacific/Auckland), WG403
This talk will take you through my journey of building Spatial Thoughts and share insights into what it takes to build a education business powered by open content and open-source ethos.
This talk will cover my 5-year journey into building Spatial Thoughts - a learning platform for modern geospatial technologies. Based on the idea that learning should be accessible to all, I made a conscious choice to make all of our learning content open-source and available under a very liberal license. Not monetizing the content turned out to be an important decision, and while it may seem counterintuitive, it was key in powering the growth of the company. Hope this talk will inspire you to consider alternative business models and adopt the ethos of open-source software in your work.
Ujaval is the founder of Spatial Thoughts - a learning platform for modern geospatial technologies. Ujaval got his Masters in Geospatial Information Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After joining Google Inc. in California, he moved to India in 2006. He was one of the early employees at Google India and part of the team that launched Google Maps for India. He worked on multiple Geo teams at Google and led the GIS team in India.
After 15 years of corporate experience, he left Google in 2020 to work on his startup - Spatial Thoughts - to create a learning platform to bridge the skill gap in the geospatial industry. His online academy has trained participants from over 100 countries. His learning materials on QGIS, Python, Earth Engine, and GDAL are cited as the top learning resources globally and are used by more than 1 million people every year.
Ujaval is a world-renowned training facilitator and is passionate about advancing the use of open-source technologies in teaching and research. He is an active QGIS community contributor and a QGIS.org certified training provider.