Dear community,

First of all, I would like to thank Paolo for his work during the last two years as Chair and for the years before that, and years to come in his role as PSC member. I’m looking forward to keeping up the good work with him.

Secondly, I would like to thank all the community voting members for all the great inputs during the discussion phase of the AGM and for the fantastic participation in the voting process where we had more than an 80% turnout.

It is a pleasure to see that besides approving the more formal points (annual report, financial report, budget and auditors), the AGM approved all matters arising:

• We now have two new honourable voting members: Harrissou Sant-anna and Nyall Dawson. Honourable members are specially designated voting members, whose position does not need to be affiliated with a country user group. Congratulations, and thank you, you are both such an inspiring example to our community!
• Many QGIS users and contributors are geoscientists or geoinformatics specialists. As such, we need to act responsibly and serve as role models. Thanks to the approval of our new environmental policy, QGIS.ORG and the QGIS community committed ourselves to act responsibly regarding our actions and activities where it has any relevant influence on the environment. This will mainly affect our server infrastructure and our physical contributor meetings. The complete policy can be found in appendix 1 of our AGM minutes or on our website.

Beyond thanking Paolo as outgoing chair, I’d especially like to thank Tim, Andreas, Anita and Jürgen for the great work they are doing in the PSC and in general the incredible drive they have in helping to make QGIS thrive. I’m sure that with the help of our new Vice-Chair Alessandro Pasotti we’ll be able to take QGIS to even greater heights. Welcome, Alessandro!

Last, but definitely not least, I’d like to thank every single member of this amazing community for all your help documenting, coding, translating, testing, designing, teaching, supporting and in general spreading the QGIS love.

I never thought, when I first started using QGIS 0.6 in 2005 that 15 years later I would be given the honour of becoming the official face of such an amazing heart.

Have a great week, rock on QGIS!

Marco Bernasocchi

Incoming Chair of the QGIS.ORG Board

 

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For Reference, here an extract of my published vision for QGIS.org:

I want to help QGIS and it’s community thrive under the value proposition of:

Making the most amazing opensource GIS that provides users with value and that meets their needs by providing great functionality and usability, being cost-effective whilst being actively supported by a vibrant and knowledgeable community.

Sharing our work under an open-source license is part of the approach by which we achieve that value proposition as it allows broad collaboration with our developers and users community.

I see FOSS as a very socially responsible way to develop software, but even more, I see the immense technological advantage that writing open-source code brings. This is why I want our focus to be on allowing both pragmatic and ideological views to respectfully coexist and enrich each other.

One of my main motivations to be part of the PSC and to make myself available as project Chair 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 to ensure that QGIS remains an attractive project for volunteers to contribute to and help QGIS and its community to grow to become even more the reference [Open Source] GIS project.