Abstract: Geographers have always built the instruments through which places are seen, measured, and compared. In this talk, I will discuss why it matters, now more than ever, to ask who builds those instruments, how they are built, and whose work counts as scholarship, especially when the instruments are software. 

As PySAL, the Python Spatial Analysis Library, marks twenty-five years, the talk looks back at how the project began and grew and forward to what its next decade needs, asking what running an open source project inside a university reveals about credit, collaboration, teaching, and community. Along the way it considers what open source means for who gets to take part in spatial analysis.

No programming background is required.