During the pandemic, people noticed how well they could work remotely, how productive meetings via video call could be, and how well webinars worked. At OPENGIS.ch, this wasn’t news because we have always been 100% remote. However, we missed the unplanned, in-person interactions that occur during meetups with a or . That’s why we’re very pleased that last week we could join the Swiss QGIS user day for the second time after the pandemic.

OPENGIS.ch has been invested in QGIS since its inception in 2014, actually even before; our CEO Marco started working with QGIS 0.6 in 2004 and our CTO Matthias with version 1.7 in 2012. Since 2019, we have also been the company with the most core committers. We can definitely say that OPENGIS.ch has been one of the main driving forces behind the large adoption of QGIS in Switzerland and worldwide. 

Looking at the work done in the QGIS code we’re by far the most prolific company in Switzerland and second worldwide only to North Road Consulting. On top of it, we were the first – and still only one of two- companies to sustain QGIS.org at a Large level since 2021.

This makes us very proud and it is why we’re even happier to see how much that is happening around QGIS in Switzerland aligns with the visions and goals we set out to reach years ago.

The morning started with a presentation by our CTO Matthias “What’s new in QGIS” featuring plenty of work sponsored by the Anwendergruppe CH.

DXF Improvements, the release of SwissLocator 3.0 with swissalti3d and vector tiles integration, and an update on the advances towards solid curve handling in QGIS, a prerequisite for properly handling AV data in Switzerland, were only some of the many noteworthy points he touched.

The highlight of Matthias’ presentation was the better OGC API Features support in QGIS, which was also highlighted in a subsequent talk about Kablo, showing how the next generation of industry solutions (Fachschalen) will be implemented.

Slides: Neues aus der QGIS Welt - QGIS Anwendertag 2024

Following was a short presentation on the project DMAV, Christoph Lauber introduced a project that aims to implement an industry solution for official cadastral surveying with QGIS.

Adrian Wicki of the Federal Office for the Environment (FOEN) and Isabel presented how OPENGIS.ch and the partners Puzzle and Zeilenwerk help the FOEN with the SAM project with assess the hazards of flood, forest fire, or landslides, and warn authorities and the population. With an agile project organisation, the complex project succeeds in fulfilling requirements by applying user-centred development concepts. QGIS is used for visualizing and analyzing data and helping forecasters gain insights into the current situation.

Slides: BAFU_SAM

Andreas Neumann from ETH Zurich and Michael presented the qgis-js project. QGIS-js is an effort to port QGIS core to WebAssembly so that it can be run in a web browser. Although still in the early experimentation phase, this project has great potential to leverage interesting new use cases that weren’t even thinkable before.

Slides: https://boardend.github.io/qgis-js-demo/ 

Olivier Monod from the City of Yverdon presented Kablo, an electricity management proof of concept of the next generation implementation for industry solutions developed in collaboration with OPENGIS.ch.

By applying a middleware based on OGC API Features and Django, Kablo shows how common limitations of current industry solutions (like permission management and atomic operations) can be overcome and how the future brings desktop and web closer together.

Slides: kablo-qgis-user-days

Obviously, it wasn’t just OPENGIS.ch. Sandro Mani from Sourcepole presented the latest and greatest improvements on QWC2, like street view integration and cool QGIS features brought to a beautiful web gis. Andreas Schmid from Kt. Solothurn presented how cool cloud-optimized geotiff (COG) is and what challenges come with it. Interested in the topic? Read more in our report about cloud optimized formats. Mattia Panduri from Canton Ticino explained how they used QGIS to harmonise the cantonal building datasets and Timothée Produit from IG Group SA presented how pic2map helps bring photos to maps. 

To round up the morning, Nyall Dawson from North Road Consulting did a live session around the world to show the latest developments around elevation filtering in QGIS.

In the afternoon, workshops followed. Claas Leiner led a QGIS expression one while Matthias and Michael showed how to leverage QGIS processing for building geospatial data processing workflows. 

The first QGIS model baker user meeting took place in the third room. The participants discussed this fantastic tool we developed to make INTERLIS work smarter and more productive.

It was a very rich and constructive QGIS user day. We came home with plenty of new ideas and a sense of fulfilment, seeing how great the community we observed and helped grow has become.

A big thanks go to the organisers and everyone involved in making such a great event happen. Only the beer in the sunshine was literally watered by the rain. Nevertheless, there were exciting discussions in the station bistro or in the restaurant coaches on the way home.

See you next time and keep contributing

The international community of QGIS contributors got together in person from 18 to 22 August in parallel to OpenStreetMap State of The Map event and right before the FOSS4G. So there was a lot of open source geo power concentrated in the beautiful city of Florence in those days. It was my first participation and all I knew was that it’s supposed to be an unconference. This means, there is no strict schedule but space and opportunity for everyone to present their work or team up to discuss and hack on specific tasks to bring the QGIS project to the next level.

Introduction and first discussions

We were a group of six OPENGIS.ch members arriving mostly on Thursday, spending the day shopping and moving into our city apartment. In the evening we went to a Bisteccheria to eat the famous Fiorentina steak. It was big and delicious as was the food in general. Though, I am eating vegetarian since to compensate. On Friday we went to the Campus to meet the other contributors. After a warm welcome by the organizer, Rossella and our CEO and QGIS chair Marco Bernasocchi we did an introduction round where everyone mentioned their first QGIS version ever used. At this point, I became aware of the knowledge and experience I was sharing the room with. Besides this, I noticed that there was another company attending with several members, namely Tim Sutton’s Kartoza, which is also contributing a lot to QGIS. The first discussion was about QGIS funding model, vision, communication and on the new website in planning. This discussion then moved into some smaller groups including most of the long term contributors. I was looking around, physically and virtually, and tried to process all the new inputs and to better understand the whole QGIS world. Besides, I noticed my colleague Ivan having problems with compiling QGIS after upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04 which then motivated my other colleague Clemens to implement a docker container to do the compilation. Nevertheless, I postponed my Ubuntu upgrade. That evening we went out all together to have a beer or two and play some pool sessions and table football. Finally, the OPENGIS.ch crew navigated back home pairing a high-precision GNSS sensor with a mobile device running OpenStreetMap in QField. We arrived back home safely and super precise.

First tasks and coffee breaks

There was catering in the main hall covering breakfast, lunch and coffee breaks. It never took long after grabbing a cup of coffee to find yourself in a conversation with either fellow contributors or OpenStreetMap folks. I chatted with a mapper from Japan about mobile apps, an engineer from Colombia about travelling and a freelancer from the Netherlands about GDAL, to name 3 coffees out of many.

QGIS plugins website

After some coffee, Matthias Kuhn, our CTO and high-ranking QGIS contributor, asked me whether I could improve some ugly parts of QGIS plugins website. So I had my first task which I started working on immediately. The task was to make the site more useful on mobile devices which would be achieved by collapsing some unimportant information and even removing other parts. I noticed some quirks in the development workflow, so I also added some pre-commit hooks to the dev setup. Dimas Ciputra from Kartoza helped me finalize the improvements and merge them into master branch on github.

QGIS website downloads section

Regis Haubourg asked to help simplify the QGIS Downloads for Windows section on the main QGIS website. We played around in the browser dev tools until we thought the section looked about right. I then checked out the github repo and started implementing the changes. I need to say the tech stack is not quite easy to develop with currently, but there is a complete rework in planning. Anyway, following the pull request on github a lively discussion started which is ongoing by the time of writing. And this is a good thing and shows how much thought goes into this project.

Presentations

There were many interesting and sometimes spontaneous presentations which always involved lively discussions. Amy Burness from Kartoza presented new styling capabilities for QGIS, Tobias Schmetzer from the Bavarian Center for Applied Energy Research presented the geo data processing and pointed out issues he encountered using QGIS on this and Etienne Trimaille from 3liz talked about qgis-plugins-ci, just to name a few.

Amazing community

On Saturday evening a bus showed up at the campus and took us on a trip up to the hills. After quite a long ride we arrived at a restaurant high up with mind-blowing view of the city. I forgot how many rounds of Tuscan food were served, but it was delicious throughout. An amazing evening with fruitful conversations and many laughs.

The weather was nice and hot, the beers cold, the Tuscan food delicious and the contributors were not only popular Github avatars but really nice people. Thank you QGIS.

Learn, Present, Discuss and MEET

In Summer 2022 the Swiss QGIS User community finally got together physically again to meet at the University of Berne, after 3 years of online meetings. Up to 90 QGIS users and contributors out of academia and engineering enjoyed and discussed the newest QGIS features and use cases.

After a warm welcome and introduction by Isabel Kiefer from OPENGIS.ch the presentations started.

QGIS Update

Marco Bernasocchi (OPENGIS.ch CEO and Qgis.org Chair) presented recent QGIS features out of the changelogs of current long term release 3.22, followed by versions 3.24 and 3.26. Among the enhancements are the new curve conversion vertex tool and improvements to the mesh editing, 3D-mode, WMS server and SQL logging, to name a few.

QGIS Animation Workbench

The real world is not static. Thus, often information can be understood more easily in animated form, like visualizing traffic on a map with moving vehicles. QGIS now supports dynamic renderings with the Animation Workbench Plugin. Tim Sutton (Kartoza) led through a Youtube Video showing the underlying mechanisms of the plugin and how to use it.

QGIS Model Baker Update

Starting with the new logo, Romedi Filli (GIS-Fachstelle, Kt. Schaffhausen) showed the latest improvements to the QGIS Model Baker plugin. Especially the data validator and UsabILIty Hub make QGIS project generation out of Interlis data even easier. Even more there is now a python package for those who prefer to python script it all together.

Using QGIS Model Baker for OEREB Cadastre

Adrian Weber (Dütschler + Partner) followed up presenting the use of QGIS Model Baker in migrating their management of municipal usage plans from proprietary software to QGIS driven workflow. Though they see the potential in this approach, they lack time and money, thus doing it step by step. In providing this public service the difficulty is that data is legally binding and system components need to meet this requirements.

Dynamic Forms and Widgets with QGIS Expressions

After a coffee break, Andreas Neumann (Amt für Geoinformation, Kt. Solothurn) gave an interesting technical speech on more dynamic QGIS forms and widgets. Form values can now be defined via expressions so they update automatically depending on other form values. Furthermore, action buttons can be included into forms and defined which can call external web-services, data dependent constraints be defined and more.

Analysis of Flight Trajectories

Driven by technical ambition and will to set some factual basis for political discussion, Yvo Weidmann (Geoidee) carried out a sophisticated analysis of descents to Zurich airport based on Open Source Flight Trajectories and swisstopo data. Therefore he processed data from opensky-network.org, the Aeronautical Information Publication after a lot of initial data validation and cleaning. He finally visualized the results in a nice QGIS driven animation of flight descents.

Teksi utilities application modules

Alexandre Bosshard (Ville de Pully) presented TEKSI, an association that has set itself the task of providing the operators of public infrastructure with decision-making support in the form of professional modules for controlling their activities, namely QGEP and QWAT for the moment with more to follow. Therefore they work on open-source software built mainly on top of QGIS and PostgresSQL/PostGIS.

QGEP (by Teksi) and hydraulic analysis with SWMM

Timothée Produit (Alpnetsystem SA (IG-Group)) gave a more technical speech on their approach of managing a central database to serve both, Teksi’s waste water management tool and QGIS extension QGEP and Stormwater Management Software SWMM to carry out hydraulic analysis in Swiss Romandie. He showed the necessary database and infrastructure setup and workflow steps to create the desired product.

The new Profile Tool in QGIS Core

Nyall Dawson (North Road) led through his Youtube video about QGIS project terrain settings and how they interact with 3d maps and the new elevation profile tool, which is only possible from version 3.26. Powerfull new possibilities to process and visualize elevation and 3D geodata worth watching. Nyall joined the conference virtually after the video to answer questions from the impressed audience.

Cool Maps made with QGIS

Finally Marco Bernasocchi closed the presentations with a collection of incredibly creative QGIS results including Xmas wishes, sports statistics and human facial topology

Workshops

After a tasty lunch including a delicious cheese selection and fruitful conversations the lucky subscribers where asked to take action themselves in the four afternoon workshops. Among other interesting topics the users could get hands on working with QField and QFieldCloud or could get started with QGIS Model Baker and data validation, all tought by the experts and developers of OPENGIS.ch.

A huge success

At the end of 2019, we organised the first QField user day in Bern. Around 40 participants from Switzerland and neighbouring countries joined the packed event with use case presentations by various power users of QField.

Fantastic use-case presentations

After a brief introduction by Matthias, Samuel Wechsler from the Swiss Ornithological Institute showed how they make their teams fly with QField to be more effective in protecting the Swiss bird fauna and its habitat. Next on the podium was one of the earliest QField pioneers, Daniel Gnerre from the city of Vevey telling the audience how the city thoroughly uses QField to collect and update data on just about anything and how they integrated QField in their geospatial infrastructure.

After a short break, Philipp Eigenmann showed us how he uses QField to manage the forest he and his team are responsible for. Finally, Samuel Oester and Till Weber from Oester Messtechnik presented Gasbusters – Chasing gas with QField explaining how they used QField in over 200 soil gas leaks campaigns measuring over 39’000 points to be then visualised on maps and with Grafana.

You can find all the slides and some videos of the presentations online.

Open discussion

A user day wouldn’t be a user day if there was no space for discussion. After the fantastic presentations, we launched an open discussion on the future of QField and how to sustainably maintain its growth rate and quality thanks to [financially] committed users. The discussion showed us a lot of willingness and commitment to help QField keep its incredible innovation level and its market leader position as reference GIS fieldwork app. This obviously gave us a lot of ideas and motivation and made us enjoy the closing beers even more

We would like to extend again a warm thank you to all the speakers and participants. We’re definitely looking forward to the next QField user day!

What’s next?

On 11.03.2020, just before the QGIS hackfest in Den Bosch (NL), we’ll lead a full-day workshop in the awesome GeoFort. Don’t worry, the workshop will be in English.

QField is growing steadily, plenty of new features (including native cloud synchronisation) are planned with the next releases of QField. We’d like to thank again all organisations, companies and individuals that actively use QField and that invest in making QField even better.

If you feel QField misses something you need or would like to support the project, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.