Reporting Back From the User Conference & Contributor Meeting in Den Bosch

Posted on by underdark Posted in QGIS Hackfest, QGIS User Conference

Last week, we had our 25th Contributor Meeting in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands. Prior to the meeting, the International QGIS User Conference, brought together 200 participants from all around the world who came to learn about QGIS and exchange ideas and best practices.

The conference programme was jam-packed with great content. Over 50 presentations were given during the conference, with the participants enjoying the Dutch atmosphere whilst building up their knowledge of QGIS and sharing their ideas. With more than 20 years of development behind us, QGIS has become a stable platform that supports geospatial decision making, analysis and decision making in all sorts of endeavours. We saw lots of talks that demonstrated this maturity, for example a presentation John Holden and Blake Esselsteyn showed how QGIS is being used to determine voting districts to support the democratic process, Angelina Savchuk showed how QGIS is being used to support the work of the Red Cross, whilst Nick Vervaal showed us how QGIS is used to make high tech artistic laser cut maps from wood.

We were honoured to be joined by Lucho Ferrer who came all the way from Peru! Ujaval Gandhi travelled all the way from India and wowed the audience with his workshop on QGIS Actions.

There are two mobile offerings for QGIS users who want to take their work out to the field. Both QField and MerginMaps had a strong presence at the User Conference, causing a lot of excitement and buzz in the audience.

Contributor Meeting

As is traditional, the contributor meeting (which was held directly after the two day user conference) was full of workshops, sessions, and spontaneous get-togethers to facilitate the exchange between community members, including sessions on:

  • Onboarding Day
  • Plans for the certification programme
  • Getting around in the QGIS community
  • Translating QGIS 
  • Documentation system and process
  • Editing the documentation online on GitHub
  • Building documentation on your local machine and using Git to make a pull request (submission)
  • Compiling QGIS
  • Making your first pull request to QGIS
  • Create QGIS issues and feature requests
  • OGC API in QGIS
  • QGIS vision
  • QGIS website update
Everyone worked hard to advance the project, the open plan space facilitating lots of ad hoc conversations which are hard to match in an online environment.
OGC API in QGIS: current support and proposed developments, hosted by Joana Simoes

From the QGIS community we would like to extend a huge ‘thank you!’ to the local organising team who hosted a flawless event and worked so hard to make sure everyone had the best experience possible. Thank you and see you next year!