Kartoza: Celebrating ten years!

Ten years ago, Gavin and Tim (with fantastic support from our wives Bridget and Marcelle) opened the virtual doors of our new company, Kartoza (Pty) Ltd. Prior to starting Kartoza together, we had both been operating small businesses catering to similar clientele and executing similar projects. Our aim was to join forces to achieve a shared vision:

“To enable a world where spatial decision making tools are universal, accessible and affordable for everyone for the benefit of the planet and its people.”

And so it was that on 1 July 2014 we started providing services for customers with a team of four. When you build a business organically as we have done, there are many things you need to put in place to be able to scale. This had many dimensions for us - here are some of the things we wanted to achieve to address the different aspects of our business:

1. Setting up an open source ERP system to handle all of our administrative systems
2. Building a team working platform for our staff to collaborate efficiently
3. Managing servers for hosting client-facing and internal services
4. Developing web applications efficiently and in a standardised way
5. Expanding our team to around 25-30 people so we could take on larger projects

30 June 2014. Kartoza and friends at FOSS GIS Unconference, Cape Town. Back row, left to right: Gavin Fleming, Tim Sutton, Christian Christelis, André Jacobs, Jeff McKenna. Front row, left to right: Admire Nyakudya and Bridget Fleming.

Life is full of surprises and so is running a company! Although we had a broad plan to service the needs of government, large and small organisations and multinationals, our strategy for the kinds of projects we were to take on also came about organically. Ten years later and we have developed very strong expertise in several fields, including:

1. Precision farming
2. Disaster Risk Reduction
3. Social upliftment and energy access (e.g. access to clean cooking technologies, macro electrification planning, improving economic access for women)
4. Biodiversity Information Systems
5. Governmental Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI)
6. General support and development of open source GIS platforms like QGIS and GeoNode

Having built our business organically also meant that we did not take on any external investment or debt. Rather, we built up the business by careful financial planning, making every cent count and focusing on delivering an excellent service to our customers, taking care of our staff and staying true to our original culture as open source, open process and open communication advocates.

Mistakes

We also made mistakes - sometimes costly - that we had to absorb. Mistakes in business can take on many forms: hiring the wrong people, working with clients who don't pay you for your work, investing company time and money in dead-end ideas, missing out on opportunities because of bad timing or not having adequate resources. Mistakes are inevitable for any company and, although we made some, we had enough safeguards and resilience in place that we could ride out the wobbles and still be here today as a thriving, happy company.

Building a solid foundation

Tim sometimes jokingly says that “bureaucracy is an inevitable consequence of business”. Our approach was to set out with a very agile and light management approach and then add layers of process to areas that we saw needed them. This approach has meant that despite now having a lot more internal systems and procedures (for things like HR, finance, coding practices, documentation, testing, DevOps, etc.), we have a company that is both agile and resting on a solid foundation of good business practices. We have also been privileged to have an amazing board of directors - the advice from our two non-executive directors is invaluable as it provides a 30 000 foot view of the company and the road ahead.

Successes

Having told you about some missteps, let us also share some of our successes - which far outshine any wrong turns we have made.

Success can be measured in many different ways.

Just surviving as a company (especially through tumultuous times like COVID epidemics) for ten years can in itself be considered a success. For the most part our initial goals have been met, which is another success. We have a wonderful and culturally diverse team of around thirty. Our staff are all remote workers, some of whom we have never met in person!

The name 'Kartoza' has become globally well known in the geospatial world and our unique branding (which is influenced by the Ndebele tribal art style of South Africa) highlights the global and African perspective that we bring to our projects.

We have built many software projects that we are really proud of. There have been so many projects that it is hard to name just a few without feeling that we are overlooking our other 'children'. There have been a few exceptions, but almost everything we have built for our clients has been published as open source, and almost without exception, our client's solutions have been built using open source components such as PostgreSQL, QGIS, GDAL/OGR, MapLibre, ReactJS and many other company favourites. These have enabled us to deliver a lot more value to our clients than the ostensible budgets they provided for projects.

As well as building software for clients, we have consistently shared our time and resources to support the open source GIS community. Here are just some of the things we have been doing to support the QGIS project:

1. Hosting the monthly QGIS open days.
2. Serving on the QGIS PSC.
3. Helping to maintain various pieces of the QGIS.org cloud infrastructure.
4. Contributing developer time to build the QGIS Changelog authoring platform.
5. Compiling the changelog with each release of QGIS (now mostly taken care of by the contributions of Charles Dixon-Paver).
6. Building and maintaining the sustaining member management platform.
7. Creating and populating the QGIS lessons platform.
8. Creating the QGIS hub platform - a place to find and share QGIS styles, models, 3D Objects, projects and more.
9. Creating the QGIS Analytics dashboard.
10. Maintaining and improving the QGIS plugins website.
11. Maintaining and improving the QGIS feed platform.
12. Co-planning and maintaining the QGIS Certification platform.
13. …. and more!

For the last year or so, we have also been privileged to be the host organisation for two full time QGIS contributors whose salaries are funded by QGIS.org.

We are also active in the broader open source GIS community beyond QGIS. For example, Gavin and I were part of the organising committee for FOSS4G2018 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Another success story has been the Docker images we publish - our PostGIS and GeoServer images have been particularly popular with many millions of downloads.

Our GitHub repository is a rich collection of open source work that we have created or forked to enhance.

Not only do we develop software and systems but we write manuals and documentation and conduct training. We must have trained hundreds if not thousands of professionals, university students, teachers and secondary school learners over the years in topics like QGIS, GeoNode, PostGIS and the bespoke platforms we implement.

Levelling up

In the last few years we have been investing heavily in our company systems. In particular, we have implemented an ERP system based on ERPNext, an open source business management platform. This has greatly helped us to systematise and streamline our company operations. We also built some fantastic tools for time tracking, scrum burndown chart generation, resource planning etc. that integrate with ERPNext.

On the DevOps side, our team has been overhauling our server management practices and have built a fantastic suite of DevOps tools composed from popular open source infrastructure management components. We have been gradually moving our legacy deployments over to our new managed platform.

On top of these two initiatives (our ERP system and our DevOps platform) we are excited to share the news that we will be launching a new hosting service for some of the popular open source geospatial platforms, including some that our developers have helped to build. Our service will provide point and click deployments, Service Level Agreements and a helpdesk system for easy access to our support team.

Thank you

To all of our customers, fans, staff and ‘friends of the company’, we would like to say a big Thank You! We have enjoyed the journey with you and we look forward to working with you for the next ten years!