Last weekend (November 5th – November 8th, 2015) was a special occasion for the QGIS Project – we convened the 14th our ‘hackfest’ meeting!
QGIS hackfests are events where an organiser provides a space for collaboration and members of the community converge and self-organise to improve the QGIS project. We are very much dependent on the good will of our hosts – typically universities – for providing these spaces and the logistics needed to manage the provision of accommodation, food, internet and other needs of our participants over the duration of the hackfest. For this event our gracious hosts were Universitas de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Our presence at the University was endorsed and facilitated by:
- Rector of ULPGC: José Regidor García
- ULPGC Manager: Conrado Domínguez Trujillo
- CIO of ULPGC and Director of OSL (“oficina de software libre”, or Free Software Office): Jose Pablo Suárez Rivero.
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Councilor of New Technologies Area, Public Administration and Sports at Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Town Hall: Aridany Romero Vega
- Senior professor of computer Science: Agustín Trujillo Pino
- Design: Ramsés Cabello Developer (staff at the event): Jaisiel Santana Almedia
- Developer (staff at the event): Alejandro Sánchez Medina
- Developer (staff at the event): Chano OrtegaTrujillo
- Developer (staff at the event): Moises Bonilla
Our heartfelt thanks to all of the people who worked so hard to make this event happen, and to the participants who travelled from far and wide to attend the event. These events are a significant factor in the success of the QGIS project – they allow our developers and contributors to meet face to face and delve deep into technical issues that would be impossible to do under the somewhat disconnected collaboration environment provided by the internet.
Key Activities
- Qt5 / Python 3 proof of concept by Matthias Kuhn
- Topological editing with GRASS plugin (Radim Blazek) – video (not from event)
- Geoserver explorer plugin (Luigi Pirelli)
- General discussion and planning for the improvement of contribution workflows (pull requests, tickets, QEPs) and infrastructure (Redmine)
- Improvement of analysis tools (ftools, processing) and their documentation
- General bug fixes (Jürgen Fischer)
- Improvements to the QGIS.org website (Richard Duivenvoorde and Anita Graser)
- Implementation of a GitHub webhook to insert a ‘[FEATURE] issue’ so that documenters know to document new features as they are added to QGIS (Richard Duivenvoorde and Raymond Nijssen)
- Processing support for loading Oracle data via OGR (Giovanni Manghi)
- Launched the Italian QGIS User Group, updates to the documentation of Lizmap web client, managed the Italian translation, the python plugin queue (Paolo Cavallini)
QGIS Sponsorship
Many of the costs not covered by our hosts were covered from central QGIS.org funds including food and travel costs for a number of participants. These funds originate from our donors and sponsorships and are an invaluable resource for the project to allow us to facilitate these events and move the development of QGIS forward. We encourage you to donate to the QGIS or become a sponsor if you would like to foster further innovation and support the long terms goals of the project.
More Information
If you would like further information about what was covered in the event, and to get a feel of the general atmosphere of the event, check out some of these links:
- Pablo Fernández Moniz created this collation of photos from the event.
- Anita Graser compiled this great storify timeline of the event.
- Alessandro Pasotti compiled a really great report of his experiences at the event.
I will update the list above as more reports backs become available.
Thanks
With thanks from your project chair and the whole QGIS community,
QGIS.org blog 