We are happy to announce that OSGeo kindly extended an invitation to have a QGIS contributor meeting joining the OSGeo Community Sprint 2023 during the Big Data from Space 2023 conference in Vienna.

The 26th QGIS Contributor Meeting will be held from Monday, November 6th to Thursday, 9th.

• Where: Austria Center Vienna https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=16/48.2343/16.4144
• When:  Mon 2023-⁠⁠11-06 09:00 -⁠⁠ Thu 2023-11-09 12:00

For more details and to sign up, please visit the corresponding OSGeo announcement page.

About QGIS contributor meetings

QGIS Contributors Meetings are volunteer-driven events where contributors to the QGIS project from around the world get together in a common space – usually a university campus. During these events, contributors to the QGIS project take the opportunity to plan their work, hold face-to-face discussions and present new improvements to the QGIS project that they have been working on. Everybody attending the event donates their time to the project for the days of the event. As a project that is built primarily through online collaboration, these meetings provide a crucial ingredient to the future development of the QGIS project. The event is planned largely as an ‘unconference’ with minimal structured programme planning. We do this to allow attendees the freedom to meet dynamically with those they encounter at the event. Those sessions that are planned are advertised on the event web page, and we try to enable remote participation through video conferencing software. Although our hosts are not funded and donate the working space to us, we show our appreciation by making one of our software release’s splash screens in honour of that host, which is a great way to gain exposure of your institution and country to the hundreds of thousands of users that make use of QGIS.

About OSGeo

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) has a long tradition of organizing code sprints for developers of Free and Open Source GIS software.

Since 2009, the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) has been organizing a yearly Code Sprint of the “C Tribe” OSGeo projects, which has evolved into a full OSGeo Community Sprint and all “Tribes” are included/welcome. Leading developers of projects like GDAL, PostGIS,
MapServer, GeoServer, GRASS, QGIS, PDAL, pygeoapi and many more get together to discuss new ideas, hack, decide, tackle large geospatial problems and have fun.

The OSGeo Community Sprint is open to all who wish to participate in one or more projects. There is always plenty to do – it’s not all about programming. Translation, documentation, feedback, discussions, testing – all this is also important for projects so everyone is cordially invited to attend the code sprint!

About BiDS

BiDS brings together key actors from industry, academia, EU entities and government to reveal user needs, exchange ideas and showcase the latest technical solutions and applications touching all aspects of space and big data technologies, providing a unique opportunity to discuss and present the most recent innovations and challenges encountered in the context of big data from space. The 2023 edition of BiDS will focus not only on technologies enabling insight and foresight inferable from big data from space. Together, we want to emphasize how breakthrough space data-driven technologies impact society’s grand challenges, such as climate change and the green transition.

The event, organized by the European Space Agency (ESA) together with the European Union Satellite Center (SatCen) and the Joint Research Center (JRC), will take place at the Austria center Vienna, and counts on the support of the partners FFG, Austria in Space and the Federal Ministry Republic of Austria.

We are happy to announce that our 25th Contributor Meeting will be held in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands from 20 to 23 April 2023.

uc2023.qgis.nl

Leading up to the contributor meeting, we will also have a two-day International QGIS User Conference, on 18 & 19 April.

QGIS Contributors Meetings are volunteer-driven events where contributors to the QGIS project from around the world get together in a common space – usually a university campus. During these events, contributors to the QGIS project take the opportunity to plan their work, hold face-to-face discussions and present new improvements to the QGIS project that they have been working on. Everybody attending the event donates their time to the project for the days of the event. As a project that is built primarily through online collaboration, these meetings provide a crucial ingredient to the future development of the QGIS project. The event is planned largely as an ‘unconference’ with minimal structured programme planning. We do this to allow attendees the freedom to meet dynamically with those they encounter at the event. Those sessions that are planned are advertised on the event web page and we try to enable remote participation through video conferencing software. Although our hosts are not funded and donate the working space to us, we show our appreciation by making one of our software release’s splash screens in honour of that host, which is a great way to gain exposure of your institution and country to the hundreds of thousands of users that make use of QGIS.

For more details and to sign up, please visit the corresponding wiki page.

On behalf of QGIS.ORG and the whole community, I’m would like to extend our thanks and congratulations to all the local volunteers who helped to make the event happen, with special thanks to Luigi “Ginetto” Pirelli, who spearheaded the effort. The event, which included a full week of workshops, a user conference, and contributor meeting, marked another milestone in the history of QGIS.

It was possibly the largest meeting we have had to date. It especially gratifying seeing more diversity and new faces. Our inclusive and welcoming community has always been a point of pride and it was amazing seeing how newcomers easily and pleasantly integrating in the community, producing good and tangible results within just a few days.

Many decisions were made, many discussions were fruitfully concluded, many tortillas were eaten, plans were laid out. These events are critical for preparing the way for the future of the QGIS.ORG project.

Our heartfelt thanks to all who donated their time and intellect, and to the many donors and sponsors to make all this possible.

See you in Bucharest next August, for the 23rd QGIS meeting!

QGIS.ORG

This post summarizes personal reports of community members who attended the 20^th Hackfest in Stone Town, Zanzibar the week before the FOSS4G in Dar Es Salaam.

Report from Matteo Ghetta

QGIS developers spent 3 days in the beautiful island of Zanzibar were they worked on bug fixing, improvement of new features and documentation enhancements. It is extremely important for developers to meet together and spend some days working side by side given that the geographical distribution is very wide.

Thanks to the (local government & Yves Barthelemy) we had the chance to visit the Land Mapping Commission in Stone Town: It has been an amazing experience for both developers and local council. Moreover developers visited the SUZA (University of Zanzibar) and saw the local infrastructure and GIS related workflow.

• I have merged many PR of the documentation
• Many old and not old issues have been closed or the author has been pinged
• Many new additions to the documentation both small corrections and new sections from scratch
• A new version of DataPlotly released
• A small presentation of DataPlotly to the QGIS crew

Report from Mario Baranzini

I spent one day of the Hackfest contributing to the SLYR project, improving the conversion of LAB colors. SLYR (https://github.com/nyalldawson/slyr) is a project started and almost entirely developed by Nyall (which was not present to the Hackfest) which aims to provide tools to extract and convert symbols from ESRI .lyr and .style files and use them in QGIS. Nyall has recently worked hard on the project and perhaps soon sponsorship will allow further development.

Around this theme there is a keen interest. Even during the FOSS4G there has been discussion of the conversion of ESRI symbols and there was also a presentation of how the conversion in Israel is currently managed.

During the rest of the hackfest, I worked on the implementation of the new QField file selector.

Report from Denis Rouzaud

• I refreshed the Python API documentation with latest versions (3.2 and master).
• I implemented the notification system on Mac OS
• I planned a Mac OS dedicated bug-fixing programme (now successfully launched) and discussed the future of the release process for Mac.
• I implemented geometry editing in QField (aka QGIS mobile)
• I improved the vector layer properties dialog by creating a single table for layer capabilities (editable, identifiable, removable, read-only).

Report from Tim Sutton

Firstly let me thank the QGIS project for contributing to my travel and accommodation costs – I am most grateful for the support! This hackfest was special for me because it is the first hackfest in an African country. As an African born person living in the interface between “first world” and “third world”, I have always had a particular social agenda with QGIS: To bring spatial tools to support responsible and sustainable management of our world. There is a huge technological and skills divide between Europe and less developed societies where QGIS can be a valuable social enabler in helping to advance the standard of living and quality of life. Hosting a hackfest in an environment where we don’t have tree cadastres, street furniture cadastres and every aspect of civilian life mapped and systematised is an important way to build empathy and understanding in our QGIS core community members for a broader cross-section of our user base. Having the opportunity to meet with users from ZMI (the Zanzibar Mapping Initiative) and students from the local university was a really uplifting experience. ZMI are building the national cadastre from the ground up using QGIS, PostGIS and UAV mapping. We were privileged to have a number of Zanzibar residents join us on the hackfest and get to experience just how appreciative they are, first hand.

There were a number of interesting topics that arose during the hackfest which I will try to summarise here:

Certification:

We held an extended meeting on the QGIS Certification Programme, mainly detailing how we should go about the review process for onboarding new organisations.

Mac OS Build:

I spent quite a bit of time struggling with my MacOS build on QGIS. It’s definitely an area of the project that needs more work as the process can be non-trivial and the brew based formulas quickly become outdated.

QField Show and Tell:

Matthias showed off the latest version of QField and all the hard work they have been putting into the QGIS mobile client. This Android based version of QGIS for mobile data gathering is a really great project and is getting more and more useful with each release. There was also a translation sprint for QField during which I translated it to Afrikaans.

QField Autobuilds:

Denis and Matthias showed off the work they have done to automate the .apk builds for QField. Their system combines Travis and some git hooks to automatically build .APK’s whenever a pull request os made or a tag is made. See the QField travis for details: https://github.com/opengisch/QField/blob/master/.travis.yml

Plotly plugin:

Matteo Ghetta showed off the latest capabilities of the Data Plotly plugin for QGIS 3. The plugin supports the creation of a wide assortment of charts from your layer’s attribute data. See the plugin homepage here for examples and more detail: https://github.com/ghtmtt/DataPlotly 

Governance:

I took the opportunity to sign off the statute changes from 2017 general meeting. This was my last official act as outgoing project Chair. I was also extremely humbled to be awarded an Honorary PSC membership during the FOSS4G2018 conference.

Easter Eggs:

I contributed a couple of new easter eggs to QGIS. While easter eggs are fun, the data behind these hidden tools provide an important history of the project. I took the opportunity of having many long-time QGIS community members around the dinner table to collate all the previous QGIS meet-up dates. You can view this as a map here: https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/blob/master/resources/data/qgis-hackfests.json 

The spatial clustering of these events shows that going to Zanzibar and getting out of our geographical comfort zone is a really useful endeavour.

Report from Paolo Cavallini

During the HF in Zanzibar I mainly worked on:

• Plugins: I cleaned up the queue of unapproved plugins, contacting all individual authors, fixing what was possible and deprecating the worst cases; we also solved a long standing issue with a contentious plugin
• Issues: I examined many tickets, especially those waiting for feedback
• Training certification: through a very productive meeting we defined clear rules for accepting certifying organizations, with the main aim of driving people to actively support the project:
  • in the application process, the proponent should explain what are his contribution to QGIS project
  • following an initial review, the application will be sent to local QGIS groups for their opinion, which should take place in less than one monthly; where there is no user group, the responsibility will fall entirely on PSC shoulders
  • the training material for each course should be released with a free license, and a review will be done; if the material is not of adequate quality, this is a cause for refusal
  • then PSC will take a decision and publish the contributions as stated by the proponent, for transparency
• Other meetings helped focusing on our mission, defining the relationship between volunteer and paid work, and other
• I visited the Land Mapping Commission and the University, soliciting a tighter cooperation with QGIS project.

Report from Admire Nyakudya

During the heck fest in Zanzibar, I mainly worked on porting some common plugin we use to QGIS 3. The plugins I mainly worked on were Cogo Parcel plugin and Sg Diagram downloader. We visited the Zanzibar mapping agency and interacted with the people who were working on capturing cadastral data using QGIS and explained them about the COGO Parcel plugin which streamlines capturing cadastral boundaries in QGIS and storing the results in a PostgreSQL database. To summarise the work I was working on during the heck fest.

• Port Cogo Plugin from QGIS 2 to make it compatible with QGIS 3. This has been achieved and now awaiting one of my team members to approve the pull request.
• Expand functionality being offered by the COGO Parcel plugin to include the new reporting framework in QGIS 3.
• Investigate ways to generate projects on the fly after talking to Matteo and seeing the work he has done with QGIS project generator.

I also went to the Zanzibar university to see ways in which QGIS is being used in the local university and how students are integrating drone imagery with QGIS.

Report from Matthias Kuhn

The highest value of hackfests is actually to meet and greet and discuss ideas and bigger plans. There is a lot of communication on a high bandwidth channel (also known as face-to-face) that strengthens the community. This helps to quickly overcome technical problems sometimes. Or to give someone some tips and tricks you normally wouldn’t come to (e.g. optimizing a git workflow) that results in a long-term gain because of sustainable productivity improvements. I tend to walk around once in a while and just randomly bump into people where I – more or less successfully – try to help them solve their issues or discuss approaches. In the same area, there is the possibility to informally discuss plans about organization, workflows and strategies. The concept of an LTR was to a big degree discussed and built at a hackfest in Essen some years ago. This year there was a very interesting discussion about the topic LTR. For how much time the “long” in the term “long term release” should stand, about the life cycle of releases and of long-term releases. One of the important things when it comes to this question is what organisations think and do – because, in the end, it is mostly for organisations that the LTR exists – and how development resources can be assigned to the task of keeping a high quality of an LTR during its whole lifetime. There are no conclusions yet, but synchronizing on these ideas is often the seed for tomorrow’s exciting changes.

We were also visited by a group of students from the local university. It was really refreshing to talk to them about open source and QGIS and how we work and what the challenges of spatial data and GIS infrastructure are on an island like Zanzibar.

Feature-wise, the main thing I worked on feature wise was a new snap to grid functionality that is available for digitizing tools. It allows configuring a precision for vector layers. Whenever a new node is added or an existing one is edited on this vector layer, it will be automatically placed on this grid. Normally this is used to force the objects on a layer to something like cm or mm resolution.

And then, of course, I did my daily bunch of (mostly volunteer) pull request reviewing, some code cleanup and some bugfixes.

Report from Marco Bernasocchi

https://photos.app.goo.gl/seX2kSJ9vKxKBZt58

The Zanzibar hackfest was a special one for me, my first hackfest as QGIS.org co-chair. My main goal was definitely to get as much information out of Tim as possible so that I wouldn’t have to keep on bugging him all time

Beside that, multiple meetings where planned to which I took part, as Paolo already explained, we had very good meetings about:

• Certifications meeting
• Trademark discussion
• Creating a membership system that allows entities that are not allowed to budget sponsoring money to instead become paying members.
• Other meetings helped focusing on our mission, defining the relationship between volunteer and paid work, and other

On the first two days, we were joined by a largish group of local students to whom I explained how the structure of QGIS.org works and where they could help. I also helped them choosing a task to work and mentored them.

As I mentioned before, I spent a lot of time asking a lot of questions to Tim to get the biggest possible knowledge transfer about running QGIS.org and some time choosing and booking restaurants for our evening “meetings”

On the technical side, I worked with Mario on a new implementation of the QField File selector.

After everybody left, the OPENGIS.ch team stayed one day longer and introduced Mario to the real Brighton-style hackfest with take-away pizza

This year, we are looking forward to the 3rd installment of our annual QGIS conference and it will be the biggest one yet!

The QGIS community, developers and users are meeting from August 2–11, 2017 in Nødebo at University of Copenhagen’s Forest and Landscape College.

The program consists of the main conference, as well as a developer meeting and multiple workshops, including:

• QGIS Expressions
• Plugin development in Python
• QGIS Server and Web Client
• QField
• QGIS cartography
• …

The program is already online. So register and make sure to get a spot in your favorite workshops!

Let’s meet and make QGIS even better!

Last week we kicked off the first (of hopefully many) Australian QGIS hackfests Developers Meetings. It was attended by 3 of the core QGIS development team: Nathan Woodrow, Martin Dobias and myself (Nyall Dawson), along with various family members. While there’s been QGIS hackfests in Europe for over 10 years, and others scattered throughout various countries (I think there was a Japanese one recently… but Twitter’s translate tool leaves me with little confidence about this!), there’s been no events like this in the Southern hemisphere yet. I’ve been to a couple in Europe and found them to be a great way to build involvement in the project, for both developers and non-developers alike.

In truth the Australian hackfest plans began mostly an excuse for Nathan and I to catch up with Martin Dobias before he heads back out of this hemisphere and returns to Europe. That said, Nathan and I have long spoken about ways we can build up the QGIS community in Australia, so in many ways this was a trial run for future events. It was based it in Noosa, QLD (and yes, we did manage to tear ourselves away from our screens long enough to visit the beach!).

Nathan Woodrow (@NathanW2), myself (@nyalldawson), and Martin Dobias (@wonder-sk)

Here’s a short summary of what we worked on during the hackfest:

• Martin implemented a new iterator style accessor for vertices within geometries. The current approach to accessing vertices in QGIS is far from optimal. You either have the choice of an inefficient methods (eg QgsGeometry.asPolyline(), asPolygon(), etc) which requires translations of all vertices to a different data structure (losing any z/m dimensional values in the process), or an equally inefficient QgsAbstractGeometry.coordinateSequence() method, which at least keeps z/m values but still requires expensive copies of every vertex in the geometry. For QGIS 3.0 we’ve made a huge focus on optimising geometry operations and vertex access is one of the largest performance killers remaining in the QGIS code. Martin’s work adds a proper iterator for the vertices within a geometry object, both avoiding all these expensive copies and also simplifying the API for plugins. When this work lands traversing the vertices will become as simple as

for v in geom.vertices():
   ... do something with the vertex!

• Martin is also planning on extending this work to allow simple iteration over the parts and rings within geometries too. When this lands in QGIS we can expect to see much faster geometry operations.
• Nathan fixed a long standing hassle with running standalone PyQGIS scripts outside of the QGIS application on Windows. In earlier versions there’s a LOT of batch file mangling and environment variable juggling required before you can safely import the qgis libraries within Python. Thanks to Nathan’s work, in QGIS 3.0 this will be as simple as just making sure that the QGIS python libraries are included in your Python path, and then importing qgis.core/gui etc will work without any need to create environment variables for OSGEO/GDAL/PLUGINS/etc. Anyone who has fought with this in the past will definitely appreciate this change, and users of Python IDEs will also appreciate how simple it is now to make the PyQGIS libraries available in these environments.
• Nathan also worked on “profiles” support for QGIS 3.0. This work will add isolated user profiles within QGIS, similar to how Chrome handles this. Each profile has it’s own separate set of settings, plugins, etc. This work is designed to benefit both plugin developers and QGIS users within enterprise environments. You can read more about what Nathan has planned for this here.
• I continued the ongoing work of moving long running interface “blocking” operations to background tasks. In QGIS 3.0 many of these tasks churn away in the background, allowing you to continue work while the operation completes. It’s been implemented so far for vector and raster layer saving, map exports to images/PDF (not composers unfortunately), and obtaining feature counts within legends. During the hackfest I moved the layer import which occurs when you drag and drop a layer to a destination in the browser to a background task.
• On the same topic, I took some inspiration from a commit in Sourcepole’s QGIS fork and reworked how composer maps are cached. One of my biggest gripes with QGIS’ composer is how slow it is to work with when you’ve got a complex map included. This change pushes the map redrawing into a background thread, so that these redraws no longer “lock up” the UI. It makes a HUGE difference in how usable composer is. This improvement also allowed me to remove those confusing map item “modes” (Cache/Render/Rectangle) – now everything is redrawn silently in the background whenever required.
• Lastly, I spent a lot of time on a fun feature I’ve long wanted in QGIS – a unified search “locator” bar. This feature is heavily inspired by Qt Creator’s locator bar. It sits away down in the status bar, and entering any text here fires up a bunch of background search tasks. Inbuilt searches include searching the layers within the current project (am I the only one who loses layers in the tree in complex projects!?), print layouts in the project, processing algorithms, and menu/toolbar actions. The intention here is that plugins will “take over” and add additional search functionality, such as OSM place names searching, data catalog searches, etc. I’m sure when QGIS 3.0 is released this will quickly become indispensable!

The upcoming QGIS 3.0 locator bar

Big thanks go out to Nathan’s wife, Stacey, who organized most of the event and without whom it probably would never have happened, and to Lutra Consulting who sponsored an awesome dinner for the attendees.

We’d love this to be the first of many. The mature European hackfests are attended by a huge swath of the community, including translators, documentation writers, and plugin developers (amongst others). If you’ve ever been interested in finding out how you can get more involved in the project it’s a great way to dive in and start contributing. There’s many QGIS users in this part of the world and we really want to encourage a community of contributors who “give back” to the project. So let Nathan or myself know if you’d be interested in attending other events like this, or helping to organize them locally yourself…

From 28th April to 1st May the QGIS project organized another successful developer meeting at the Linuxhotel in Essen, Germany. Here is a quick summary of the key topics I’ve been working on during these days.

New logo rollout

It’s time to get the QGIS 3 logo out there! We’ve started changing our social media profile pictures and Website headers to the new design: 

Resource sharing platform 

In QGIS 3, the resource sharing platform will be available by default – just like the plugin manager is today in QGIS 2. We are constantly looking for people to share their mapping resources with the community. During this developer meeting Paolo Cavallini and I added two more SVG collections:

Road sign SVGs by Bertrand Bouteilles & Roulex_45 (CC BY-SA 3.0)

SVGs by Yury Ryabov & Pavel Sergeev (CC-BY 3.0)

Unified Add Layer button

We also discussed the unified add layer dialog and are optimistic that it will make its way into 3.0. The required effort for a first version is currently being estimated by the developers at Boundless.

TimeManager

The new TimeManager version 2.4 fixes a couple of issues related to window resizing and display on HiDPI screens. Additionally, it now saves all label settings in the project file. This is the change log:

- Fixed #222: hide label if TimeManager is turned off
- Fixed #156: copy parent style to interpolation layer
- Fixed #109: save label settings in project
- Fixed window resizing issues in label options gui
- Fixed window resizing issues in video export gui
- Fixed HiDPI issues with arch gui

Last weekend (November 5th – November 8th, 2015) was a special occasion for the QGIS Project – we convened the 14th our ‘hackfest’ meeting!

QGIS hackfests are events where an organiser provides a space for collaboration and members of the community converge and self-organise to improve the QGIS project. We are very much dependent on the good will of our hosts – typically universities – for providing these spaces and the logistics needed to manage the provision of accommodation, food, internet and other needs of our participants over the duration of the hackfest. For this event our gracious hosts were Universitas de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Our presence at the University was endorsed and facilitated by:

Our heartfelt thanks to all of the people who worked so hard to make this event happen, and to the participants who travelled from far and wide to attend the event. These events are a significant factor in the success of the QGIS project – they allow our developers and contributors to meet face to face and delve deep into technical issues that would be impossible to do under the somewhat disconnected collaboration environment provided by the internet.

Key Activities

QGIS Sponsorship

Many of the costs not covered by our hosts were covered from central QGIS.org funds including food and travel costs for a number of participants. These funds originate from our donors and sponsorships and are an invaluable resource for the project to allow us to facilitate these events and move the development of QGIS forward. We encourage you to donate to the QGIS or become a sponsor if you would like to foster further innovation and support the long terms goals of the project.

More Information

If you would like further information about what was covered in the event, and to get a feel of the general atmosphere of the event, check out some of these links:

• Pablo Fernández Moniz created this collation of photos from the event.
• Anita Graser compiled this great storify timeline of the event.
• Alessandro Pasotti compiled a really great report of his experiences at the event.

I will update the list above as more reports backs become available.

Thanks

With thanks from your project chair and the whole QGIS community,

Marco, Matthias and me spent three days at the QGIS hackfest in Wroclaw (pictures). There I got the time to work on the QGIS globe plugin and made a presentation of the current state.

As soon as the threading branch (Martin Dobias’ Google of Summer project) is merged into trunk, the globe should make its way into trunk as well. In the meantime you can compile the QGIS branch from guthub to test the globe. Thanks Vincent for writing step by step build instructions.