Cloud-native geo for the rest of us: lessons from working in public in Argentina #113
Description
Author(s)
Nissim Lebovits, Human Scale Data / Radiant Earth (? sort of, @jedsundwall up to you haha)
Summary
Cloud-native geospatial tools are delivering enormous value in industry and academia, but we're overlooking a crucial audience: low-capacity users in the public sector and the Global South. Drawing on a year of pilot projects with Argentine municipalities, this post argues that CNG benefits matter more for these users — not less — and that expanding access requires no new data or tooling, just a wider understanding of our audience. Concrete examples include a QGIS plugin that cut national census data access from hours to seconds, open building footprints that revealed 100,000 people missing from official population counts, and municipal-scale climate risk analyses run in Google Colab notebooks.
Why this post is relevant to Cloud Native Geo
The post directly addresses who the CNG community builds for and why. It makes the case that existing cloud-native tools, platforms, and datasets — STAC, GeoParquet, COGs, DuckDB, Source Cooperative — are already well-suited to serve municipal governments and other low-capacity users, but that this audience is largely absent from CNG discourse. The examples are drawn from real deployments with Argentine municipalities totaling roughly a million people, where CNG tools enabled climate risk assessments (flood, heat, wildfire) that are now incorporated into official municipal planning documents. The post connects community themes (open data, interoperability, accessibility) to concrete public-sector outcomes and introduces Human Scale Data, an open-source initiative to scale this work across the Global South.
Timeline
- Draft submission date: 2026-02-12
- Final publication date: As soon as feasible following review (late February / early March 2026)
Anything else to share?
Existing draft: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q_dpno4bgwyCkpk_pYJpjDY0Xc4OiF-U_xr6TwXa9mU/edit?usp=sharing
Supporting resources and references:
- LinkedIn post on the Pergamino extreme heat pilot project
- Using global open datasets to asses flood risk in La Plata's informal settlements
- QGIS plugin for Argentina's national census
- The QGIS census plugin is available in the official QGIS plugin repository
- Graphics from the pilot projects (maps, satellite imagery, charts) are available and can be included with the post