Slashgeo

The first important thing to consider; I asked this question with honesty: I don't know the answer myself! :-) But since I may be forced to share my thoughts with Jesse, Sue and Frank over the podcast, why not get some preparation? Maybe it's because I mainly speak french that any preemptive analysis won't be bad? ;-)
 
 
 
  - Who is in the geospatial community?
 
 
Hopefully, Wikipedia come to the rescue: "A community usually refers to a group of people who interact and share certain things as a group, but it can refer to various collections of living things sharing an environment, plant or animal. This article focuses on human communities, in which intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of adhesion."

 
The geospatial community shares the 'geospatial' as passion or work (or even better, both!). Those who are hobbyist exists in the community with various levels of integration. Most hobbyist and geospatial devices consumers won't probably actively participate to the community. Does that count them out? As for the geospatial professionals, they're quite diverse too. The reason is simple, geospatial technologies are extremely varied themselves, from remote sensing to GIS to GPS to geobusiness to webmapping to geodatabase management to virtual globes, etc. Just GIS is a whole world in itself. So yes, the professional geospatial community is fragmented. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It just means the overarching 'geospatial community' is composed of many 'subset' communities.
 
 
 
  - Who is not in the geospatial community?! - Why are some geospatial professionals not in the geospatial community? - Should every geospatial professional be part of the geospatial community?
 
 
I guess the professional geospatial employee who just keep his eyes on his projects might be counted out of the community. To be part of it, you must at least have some interests in what's going on and why it's going on. I personally believe being active in the community is important. It allows us to be much more efficient. Communication and sharing has a lot of benefits. Then again, the goal for any worker is to find the appropriate equilibrium between 'taking the time to communicate and share' and 'do the actual work'. To answer my own question, I do believe every professional should be somewhat active in the community, and this might take various shapes.
 
 
 
  - What does the geospatial community do to be the geospatial community?
 
 
Communicate and share as in a loosely defined group? This can happen during conferences, workshops, co-workers, collaborative software development, mailing lists, blogs entries and comments, etc.
 
 
 
  - Is the geospatial community geospatial?
 
 
Mostly no. The geospatial community is mainly aspatial! :-) Anyone can participate no matter where they are. With globalization and information technologies, the frontier between countries is slowly getting fuzzier.
 
 
 
  - Is the geospatial community special?
 
 
To be bold; no. It's just another technology-oriented community of practice!
 
 
 
  - Is the geospatial community a Good Thing (tm)? - Does it matter that a geospatial community exists?
 
 
You bet! As I said, it allows us to be more efficient individually and collectively. And it can even be fun and enlightening to be part of such a community :-)
 
 
 
  - What is the present of the geospatial community?
 
 
Very large, fragmented, exploding, diversified, etc. And I must say, a little disorganized. But this is positively changing (I'm an optimist ;-).
 
 
 
  - What is the future of the geospatial community
 
 
I don't know. I know it's exploding. Geospatial is everywhere now (!!). Geospatial consumers tools are flooding the marketplace. This is having a significant impact on geospatial-everything, including the so-called geospatial community. Since "We create the future. With our words, our deeds and with our beliefs" (Babylon 5:"Signs and Portents"), I'm curious to see what our geospatial future is hiding for us...
 
 
So I guess the answer to the main question: "- What is the geospatial community?" lies in the various comments above. Comments?