I'm working up some statistics for my presentation at FOSS4G2007. To that end, I'd like to get a feel for the operating systems used with QGIS. We have a new poll up on qgis.org. If you could take a moment and vote, it would be very helpful. I plan to contrast the results with a similar poll we took a year or so ago.

It's been quite a long time since my last blog post. In the meantime I was quite busy with getting my bachelor thesis ready. It's about creation of a simple navigation system for vehicles. In case you'd be interested you can take a look at the thesis [PDF], but it's quite tough reading as it's written completely in Slovak language :-)

But the more interesting thing is that second part of the work was implementation of a routing/navigation system and I've chosen Quantum GIS and Python to do it. This implementation is now available online, it's called Quantum Navigator (guess why!) and licensed under the terms of GNU GPL.

There are currently two vacancies on the QGIS Project Steering Committee (PSC). These vacancies are for the Community Advisor and Financial/Marketing Advisor seats.

Nominations are now open for these two vacancies. Please see http://wiki.qgis.org/qgiswiki/Call_for_Nominations_June_2007 for complete information on the requirements and qualifications, as well as how to nominate someone.

How about presenting at FOSS4G2007 this September? I will be presenting a half-day workshop on QGIS and it would be great to have some follow-on presentations later in the week.

The board on Friday approved a motion for QGIS to enter incubation into OSGeo. This starts the incubation process to bring QGIS into full OSGeo membership. OSGeo is currently incubating a number of projects and QGIS joins GRASS and OSSIM in the Desktop Applications category.

The Quantum GIS project today submitted the request to join the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo).

The next step is approval by the OSGeo Incubation Committee, which will kick off the incubation process.

Polling of the QGIS community has indicated broad support for joining OSGeo and we look forward to becoming an active and supportive member of the Foundation.

I sent an email to the QGIS mailing lists regarding QGIS joining the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo). To make sure everybody gets a chance to comment, the email is duplicated below. Feel free to comment.

Now that 0.8 is released, its time to consider OSGeo membership for
QGIS. Some of you may recall we ran a poll a while back about this issue.

The results were:
  Yes  	   	 81.4%  	
  Maybe 	 11.5% 	
  No  	  	  7.2% 	

Congratulations to Marco Gualdrini of Italy for being the 1,000th person to register as a QGIS user.

We have a sneaking suspicion that 1,000 users represents a fraction of the people out there that are using QGIS.

If you haven't registered and added your location to the user map, you can do so at http://qgis.org/qgis_users/index.php.

Today the MapServer export tool builds (and works) under Windows. I have uploaded a new QGIS setup for Windows to
http://qgis.org/uploadfiles/testbuilds/qgis_setup.exe.

With this build, all plugins and parts of QGIS should be functional (though untested) under Windows. This includes the new context help system (accessed by the Help button on enabled dialogs). Feel free to download the setup and give it a spin.

Note: The MapServer export tool requires Python 2.5.

First of all thanks for the many comments and tests that people are carrying out on the windows test builds - we've had over 2000 downloads of the snapshots builds and the preview2 release for windows (combined) so I guess there must really be people using windows OS out there. :-)