Dear QGIS Community

 

We recently held our 2018 QGIS Annual General Meeting. The minutes of this meeting are available for all to view. As I have previously announced, I have decided to step down as chair of the PSC this year, so this post is my last official act as QGIS Chair. Thank you all for the kind words and deeds of support you gave me during my time as project chair.

I would like to welcome our new QGIS Board Chair: Paolo Cavallini, and our new QGIS Board Vice-Chair and QGIS PSC Member, Marco Bernasocchi. In case you are not familiar with Paolo and Marco, you can find short introductions to them below. I am pleased also to say that the project governance is in good hands with Richard Duivenvoorde, Jürgen Fischer, Andreas Neumann and Anita Graser kindly making themselves available to serve on the PSC for another two years. It is also great to know that our project founder, Gary Sherman, continues to serve on the PSC as honorary PSC member. Gary set the standard for our great project culture and it is great to have his continued presence.

QGIS has been growing from strength to strength, backed by a really amazing community of kind and collaborative users, developers, contributors and funders. I am looking forward to seeing how it continues to grow and flourish and I am excited and confident it will do so with Paolo acting as the project chair and representative. Rock on QGIS!

 

Paolo Cavallini

I got involved in QGIS long ago, first as a user, then more and more deeply in various activities, initiating and supporting various plugins and core functions (e.g. GDAL Tools, DB Manager), opening and managing bugs, taking care of GRASS modules, handling the trademark registration, etc. I acted as Finance and Marketing Advisor for several years. Currently, I manage the plugin approval process. Motivation: It’s such a pleasure building up, in a truly cooperative and democratic way, together with truly intelligent people, a tool that enables people to freely do their job or pursue their interests, that I cannot resist helping as much as I can.

Marco Bernasocchi (http://berna.io @mbernasocchi)

I am an open source advocate, consultant, teacher and developer. My background is in geography with a specialization in geographic information science. I live in Switzerland in a small Romansh speaking mountain village where I love scrambling around the mountains to enjoy the feeling of freedom it gives me. I’m a very communicative person, I fluently speak Italian, German, French English and Spanish and love travelling. I work as director of OPENGIS.ch which I founded in 2011. Since 2015 I share the company ownership with Matthias Kuhn. At OPENGIS.ch LLC we (4 superstar devs and myself) develop, train and consult our client on any aspect related to QGIS. My first QGIS (to be correct for that time QuantumGIS) ever was “Simon (0.6)” during my BSc when the University of Zurich was teaching us proprietary products and I started looking around for Open Source alternatives. In 2008, when starting my MSc, I made the definitive switch to Ubuntu and I started working more and more with QGIS Metis (0.11) and ended developing some plugins and part of Globe as my Masters thesis. Since three years the University of Zurich invites me to hold two seminars on Entrepreneurship and Open Source. In November 2011 I attended my first Hackfest in Zürich where I started porting all QGIS dependencies and developing QGIS for Android under a Google Summer of Code. A couple of years and a lot of work later QField was born. Since then I’ve always tried to attend at least to one Hackfest per year to be able to feel first hand the strong bonds within our very welcoming community. In 2013 I was lucky enough to have a release named after a suggestion I saved you all from having QGIS 2.0 – Hönggerberg and giving you instead QGIS 2.0 – Dufour Beside my long story with QGIS as user and passionate advocate I have a long story as QGIS service provider where we are fully committed to its stability, feature richness and sustainable development. Furthermore, as WorldBank consultant, I am lucky enough to be sent now and then to spread the QGIS goodness in less fortunate countries. Motivation: One of my main motivation to be part of the PSC is to help QGIS keep this incredible growth rate by being even more attractive to new community members, sponsors and large/corporate users. To achieve this, the key is maintaining the right balance between sustainable processes (that guarantee the great quality QGIS has been known for) and an interesting and motivating grassroots project where community members can bloom and enjoy contributing in their most creative ways.

 

Regards

Tim Sutton (outgoing Chair)