Everything I’m about to tell you you should probably forget – in my brief experience with it, Eclipse makes for an inferior alternative to Qt Creator if you are looking for a GUI to do development on QGIS with. That said, there are those for whom Eclipse is their weapon of choice. My primary motivation [...]

Running a small business is a challenge. I came into this as a FOSS geek with a grandiose plan of spreading the FOSS GIS goodness far and wide and somehow earning a living from it. I don’t have an MBA or any significant business skills so I have been learning everything from first principles as [...]

Running a small business is a challenge. I came into this as a FOSS geek with a grandiose plan of spreading the FOSS GIS goodness far and wide and somehow earning a living from it. I don't have an MBA or any significant business skills so I have been learning everything from first principles as I go along. Using `Scrum`_ project management has been a huge step forward for us and has been instrumental on us creating a much more effective work process within the office. The next biggest challenge we have faced on our journey is how to motivate and get the best out of our staff. Having staff is a double edged sword in a small business - they can boost your productivity and earning power, but they also cost a lot of money and time (training and supervision). One of the things we do with our staff is have a bonus system whereby a percentage of their salary is dependent on performance. This theoretically motivates them to work harder to achieve their maximum earning power.

There are two problems with this bonus system though:

1. It assumes staff are motivated by money
2. It assumes you have a decent and efficient way to calibrate whether your staff members have earned their bonus or not

I am going to use Rudi as an example for this discussion (with his permission). Rudi is a young, extremely intelligent geek with deep interest in computers, technology, gaming, and writing web comics, among other things. Sounds perfect right? It is in many respects, except that you will notice that 'a never ending love of money and material goods' is missing from the list. Which means that item 1. above runs into problems. To address this, we have asked Rudi to see the allocation of bonuses as a point of prestige. Rudi grasps this concept well since he is a gamer and uses sites like stack exchange where prestige is currency de rigeur.

Item two on our problem list has also been a challenge with us. It is a problem in a number of ways. If we decide on the bonus allocation in a manner which is opaque to Rudi, he has no understanding of what is required to earn the bonus and thus it becomes 'black magic' to him and he will lose interest in the system. Another issue is that even if the criteria are shared with Rudi, he may feel we are unfair in our appraisal of the criteria. For example, we might say to Rudi that we are holding his bonus back this week because there were too many bugs in the code he committed. Rudi may feel this is unfair as the bugs may be side effects of other work or something he had no control over. To address the issue of calibration, we decided to turn the problem on its head.

How did we do this? The first thing we did was to collaboratively define the bonus criteria with Rudi. That means that each criterion was discussed and agreed apon as being a reasonable expectation. We tried to structure the criteria to include both 'hard' measurable items ("your code must be documented") and 'soft woolly' items ("you must bring more into the office than you took out"). We also tried to structure the criteria as a progression through his daily work flow - from arriving at work in the morning to working through the problems of the day, to leaving in the afternoon with a sense of 'I feel good about the work I did'. The final piece to the puzzle, and the most important is that we made the process self-monitoring.

By self-monitoring, I mean that we assigned Rudi the responsibility of noting when he doesn't meet his own criteria. To do this, we created a laminated wall chart that looks like this:

Whenever Rudi realises he hasn't achieved one of his mantra's, he will place an X in the day column next to that item. This moves all the responsibility of monitoring onto Rudi himself, and we only need to intervene if we feel that he has missed and opportunity to chastise himself - 'don't you think you should put an X in that column for forgetting to `talk to the duck`_ to help you solve your problem?'.

With our mantra sheets, allocating bonuses is now doable in a fair and efficient way, and there is a very visual reminder whenever we go off the rails. I am going to be making my own mantra sheet so that I can try to improve my own focus on my work.  Having staff in the office is great in many ways - it's good to have someone to interact with and share ideas, bounce problems around with and have some office banter with. But its also challenging to keep them motivated and focused so we are constantly looking for ways to make things run more smoothly. Do you have things that work well and help you bring out the best in your staff? Let us know in the comments below, we would love to hear your ideas!

I’ve been a VIM user for many years and over that time I have tweaked my vimrc a little (not too much mind you). I have one modification that I use probably hundreds of times a day. " Added by Tim to map alt-left/right to flip through buffers nmap <A-Left> :bp<CR> nmap <A-Right> :bn<CR> Adding [...]

So my previous article about fusing QGIS Desktop with web technologies generated quite a bit of interest, including some people interested to start hacking on it (always a good sign). In this article I want to show the next level of functionality we can obtain by means of a simple example. There won’t be any [...]

If you’ve tried centering table cell contents in xhtml2pdf, you’ve probably noticed that it doesn’t work.  The typical symptoms seem to be that cell contents are right against (or even over) the upper border of the cell. For reasons unknown, xhtml2pdf ignores “vertical-align” instructions, so you can’t use that.  To solve the problem, I did [...]

The Python bindings for QGIS introduced just before version 1.0 was released proved to be a huge boon to the development of QGIS as a popular, free alternative to proprietary vendor’s offerings. More than 100 plugins grace our plugin repository, and the ability to use Python scripting has really lowered the barrier to entry for [...]

Building a wizard in designer is overly complex and has a few pitfalls. This is especially the case when you try to build your wizard using Qt4 Designer exclusively. The main problem comes in due to the fact that although you can happily place any widgets you like onto a QWizardPage, in the QWizard you [...]

Recently, XKCD strayed into our territory with this page about map projections: To be honest, I’ve always like Gall-Peters myself, if only as a way to illustrate how map projections distort the appearance of continents. It’s quite effective at conveying this concept, because it distorts things in the opposite direction of the universally familiar Mercator. [...]

Alex Mandel on #qgis IRC channel pointed me to this site: https://www.startssl.com/ which issues level 1 SSL certs for free. We are in the process of getting a certificate issued for QGIS.org but the site is generally useful for others who would like to obtain an SSL cert for their site easily.

Here is a nice article about teaching a semester course with FOSSGIS that William Kinghorn put me on to: However, most students are shocked to discover how many capable FOSS GIS software packages exist and are excited that they can just download and install them, even on a Mac. They ask questions like, “Why isn’t [...]

At the recent get-together, I made a bunch of short clips with most of the attendees. These are presented below (or on my youtube channel). My apologies if you need to tilt your head 90′ left for some of them, YouTube’s online video editor is still a work in progress it seems… Just play the [...]

I am writing this sitting on the plane making the ~25 hour return trip from Zurich to Swellendam (via Dubai) and as has become tradition, I thought I am making this summary of the activities at our bi-annual QGIS developer meeting. The developer meetings themselves have become a huge propellant to the project – bringing together [...]

Today is the start of our 7th? QGIS developer meeting. This time it is being hosted at the Institute of Cartography, ETH Zurich. Yesterday I gave a presentation about some of the people behind the project and tried to demonstrate the societal benefits that are being realised by a project such as QGIS. For those [...]

Just a quick note on something I noticed earlier this week. Since we've been using a combination of Django and JavaScript for our websites, we're passing a lot of values around between the two, including booleans. Unexpectedly, something stopped working as soon as I started sending Python booleans to a Django template. The template was [...]

I was using Openlayers to chuck a map up onto a page - but I couldn't get it to allow other elements to render above it. Since I wanted a full-screen map, you could basically see only the map and nothing else. What happens here is that Openlayers uses the z-index CSS property for its [...]

Its probably folly to stare at download numbers too much, but it has become something of a tradition for me to post them here, so here are the results for the 1.7.0 run (which is now superceded by 1.7.1). With over 100,000 downloads in just over 3 months we are doing well! Note that as [...]

  Last week I did a short interview with Gary Sherman (the founder of the Quantum GIS project). Here is the second (of two) parts for your viewing pleasure. Part 1 is available here. Andreas and other Non-flash users can get a copy of the .mov file directly here

Looks like they are having some post announcement jitters at apple.com:   Glad its not just me who sometimes gets things screwed up....

  Last week I did a short interview with Gary Sherman (the founder of the Quantum GIS project). I am busy putting together a nice presentation of the human side of the project and I thought I would start with him. Here is the first part (of two parts)  for your viewing pleasure: Andreas and [...]