We would like to thank the developers, documenters, testers and all the many folks out there who volunteer their time and effort (or fund people to do so). From the QGIS community we hope you enjoy this release! If you wish to donate time, money or otherwise get involved in making QGIS more awesome, please wander along to qgis.org and lend a hand!
QGIS is supported by donors and sustaining members. A current list of donors who have made financial contributions large and small to the project can be seen on our donors list. If you would like to become a sustaining member, please visit our page for sustaining members for details. Your support helps us fund our six monthly developer meetings, maintain project infrastructure and fund bug fixing efforts.
QGIS is Free software and you are under no obligation to pay anything to use it – in fact we want to encourage people far and wide to use it regardless of what your financial or social status is – we believe empowering people with spatial decision making tools will result in a better society for all of humanity.
In a few weeks, our 25th Contributor Meeting and International QGIS User Conference uc2023.qgis.nl will take off on 18 April.
Register or become a speaker yourself. For details on all the exciting opportunities to get involved, check out the introduction by our awesome organizing team:
An amazing 30 new sustaining members have already answered our crowd-funding callraising total member contributions to €158,000 annually.
We are particularly happy to welcome our first medium-level university sustaining member, the University of Zurich, Department of Geography:
New medium sustaining members
Institut Dr. Nowak GmbH, GermanyBohannan Huston, New Mexico, USAUniversity of Zurich, Department of GeographyIdrostudi srl, Italy
New small sustaining members
Pacific Geomatics Limited, Canada
Helix Resources Limited, Australia
Sand Hill Geographic, Virginia, United States
GIS Pro Western Australia
The Spatial Distillery Company, Victoria, Australia
Qwast-GIS, The Netherlands
CEICOL, Colombia
QGIS user group Norway
Robex resources, Quebec, Canada
analyGIS GmbH, Switzerland
CartoExpert, France
addresscloud, UK
Baugeologie und Geo-Bau-Labor AG, Switzerland
Spatial Thoughts, India
Centremaps, UK
Geoideal, Colombia
theworksLA, California, United States
SoftWater s.r.l., Italy
menz umweltplanung,Germany
Oy Arbonaut Ltd, Finland
ZevRoss Spatial Analysis, New York, United States
Ecophylla Consulting, Ontario, Canada
DeBeer&DeVos BV, Belgium
Reuther NetConsulting, Germany
H13, Denmark
Rockwater Pty Ltd, Australia
Even with this impressive list of new members, we also realize that we have not reached the campaign goals yet and that potential large and flagship members may need more time to respond.
Our funding progress so far:
Therefore, we are extending the campaign until the end of March 2023.
Since it can be challenging to stay up to date, our monthly plugin update provides you a quick overview of the newest plugins. If any of the names or short descriptions piques your interest, you can find the direct link to the plugin page in the table below the screenshot.
QGIS turned 20 last year. Help us get ready for the next 20+ years by becoming a sustaining member!
We want to ensure another 20+ years of sustainable development to keep on bringing the most user-friendly GIS to users worldwide.
This year (2023), we, therefore, plan to focus on addressing long-standing infrastructure debt (particularly docs and web infrastructure). To make this infrastructure more sustainable, we had to make the difficult decision to move funds from our annual grant program to rather support these infrastructure tasks. To enable us to bring the grant program back to full strength and to address upcoming challenges (including but not limited to Qt6 support and next-generation installers), we need additional funds. The best way to achieve this goal is to enlarge our sustaining member base.
Our existing sustaining members contribute €130k per year. We are aiming to raise an additional €70k per year (equivalent to 1 new flagship, 3 new large, 4 new medium, and 8 new small sustaining memberships) to bring the total member contributions up to €200k.
The campaign to raise funds for our activities runs from 16th January 2023 until 16th February 2023. (Update: now extended to end of March 2023)
Our funding progress so far:
To keep the lights on, become a sustaining member or donor.
QGIS is a high-impact, global project. QGIS.org provides open access to best-in-class tools for visualizing, creating, editing, analyzing, and publication of spatially linked data and information products. QGIS.org does not prescribe how these tools should be used, but we make these tools freely available and accessible to everyone in the hope of fostering a more just society, better making, and furthering the goal of a more sustainable environment. Our cross-platform software is available on traditional desktop PC’s, on mobile devices, and in the cloud.
Who uses QGIS?
QGIS is used by governments, large multi-national organizations, corporate entities, and academic institutions all the way down to small businesses and hobbyist users. Our Open Source development model makes the software accessible to all of these users at a cost they can afford, excluding no one from the ability to benefit from QGIS.
QGIS is free of cost, not cost-free
It has taken, and will continue to take, a great deal of effort to develop high-quality tools like those provided by QGIS.org. Initially, this cost was borne exclusively through the efforts of dedicated volunteers. As the project matured, a financial ecosystem developed around the project. Customers began to contract community members to extend the QGIS project (software, documentation, online infrastructure) to better serve their needs.
In parallel with these directed funding efforts, we developed programmes for supporting the project with funds that we can use at our own discretion via donations and sustaining memberships. These discretionary funds allow us to provide all of the supporting infrastructure around the project. In addition, it enables us to fund:
Quality improvements to the software,
Host contributor meetings,
Hire technical contributors to improve broad-reach elements of the project, and
Grow the community around the project to strengthen its long-term sustainability.
A value-for-value model
Many of our users migrate to QGIS from proprietary alternatives which are financially unsustainable to use within their organizations. We celebrate the fact that we are able to open doors that would have otherwise been closed for those needing spatial tools such as QGIS. However, we also ask you to share some of the value gains that you realize from moving to QGIS with us. The funds you provide to us are used to the direct benefit of all users, who get to enjoy a more feature-rich, stable, and well-documented set of QGIS tools. This ‘value-for-value’ model helps to ensure the long-term sustainability and prosperity of the QGIS project. With nearly half a million daily active users, your contributions can make a huge impact on the lives of many people. The project has received in-kind and financial contributions from many well-known international organizations around the world, whom we thank deeply. We invite you to join the ever-growing number of organizations that see value in the work we do and share value back to us in the form of financial contributions to support our work.
QGIS.org is registered as a Swiss Verein (Association) that is operated in a non-profit manner. It is managed by an elected board and contributed to by hundreds of people from around the world. In the same way that the software we develop is open source, the project is operated with the same principle of openness, with all financial reports, board reports, and community decisions carried out in an open and transparent way.
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.
The QGIS plugin repository currently lists 1752 plugins and the list keeps on growing. This month has been busy with 14 new plugins. It can be challenging to stay up to date.
Our monthly plugin update is meant to provide you a quick overview of the newest plugins. If any of the names or short descriptions piques your interest, you can find the direct link to the plugin page in the table below the screenshot.
The QGIS plugin repository currently lists 1739 plugins and the list keeps on growing. This month has been busy with 12 new plugins. It can be challenging to stay up to date.
Our monthly plugin update is meant to provide you a quick overview of the newest plugins. If any of the names or short descriptions piques your interest, you can find the direct link to the plugin page in the table below the screenshot.
This is a Plugin for QGIS that enables users to log in to Go.Data and extract case data. Go.Data is an application which facilitates outbreak investigation, including field data collection, contact tracing, and visualization of chains of transmission.
The QGIS plugin repository currently lists 1728 plugins and the list keeps on growing. October has been busy with 15 new plugins. It can be challenging to stay up to date.
Our monthly plugin update is meant to provide you a quick overview of the newest plugins. If any of the names or short descriptions piques your interest, you can find the direct link to the plugin page in the table below the screenshot.
This connector uses the NDFF-Connector library to create all needed configuration and settings to connect to the NDFF api, to upload Observations/Waarnemingen
We would like to thank the developers, documenters, testers and all the many folks out there who volunteer their time and effort (or fund people to do so). From the QGIS community we hope you enjoy this release! If you wish to donate time, money or otherwise get involved in making QGIS more awesome, please wander along to qgis.org and lend a hand!
QGIS is supported by donors and sustaining members. A current list of donors who have made financial contributions large and small to the project can be seen on our donors list. If you would like to become a sustaining member, please visit our page for sustaining members for details. Your support helps us fund our six monthly developer meetings, maintain project infrastructure and fund bug fixing efforts.
QGIS is Free software and you are under no obligation to pay anything to use it – in fact we want to encourage people far and wide to use it regardless of what your financial or social status is – we believe empowering people with spatial decision making tools will result in a better society for all of humanity.
Lutra Consulting, North Road and Hobu are collaborating in a new crowd-funding campaign to extend these capabilities in future QGIS releases!
Highlights of the planned improvements include:
Point Clouds Creating point cloud processing tools for transformation, management and analysis of point clouds. Ensuring that extremely large (terabyte size) datasets can be handled well for both display and analysis.
Elevation Profiles Support embedding customisable elevation profiles into print layouts and atlases, and allow exporting elevation profiles to CSV and DXF.
3D Maps Faster 3D maps for large scenes, an improved 3D measurement tool and further improvements to 3D scene navigation.
Your financial support is vital to make these improvements possible! Visit the crowd funding page for additional information on what is included in the effort and how you can financially contribute.
We recently held our 2022 QGIS Annual General Meeting. The minutes of this meeting are available for all to view.
I would like to welcome our new QGIS PSC member: Régis Haubourg. Régis has been a geomatics enthusiast for years and started deploying and funding QGIS development in 2008 as a GIS and database administrator for a water basin agency.
From 2016 to 2021, he worked for Oslandia mainly on QGIS, learned “the developer’s” side of things and could professionally collaborate with other great contributors to the project. Régis has been promoting the QGIS in the french User group, organizing 4 QGIS french user days, and being the local chapter chair for 2 years. Since 2022, he has worked for a scientific institute promoting greener construction and retrofitting methods to fight against climate change. Welcome! We’re very excited to start working with you!
I’d like to take a moment to deeply thank Paolo Cavallini for all his work in QGIS and in the QGIS PSC.
Paolo got involved in QGIS very long ago, first as a user, then more and more deeply in various activities, initiating and supporting various plugins and core functions (e.g. GDAL Tools, DB Manager), opening and managing bugs, taking care of GRASS modules, handling the trademark registration, etc. Paolo also acted as Finance and Marketing Advisor for several years before taking over the plugin approval process.
Between 2018 and 2020 Paolo served as PSC chair helping QGIS rapidly evolve into a more and more professional project. In 2020 Paolo was reelected as a member of the QGIS PSC where he has been helping in different roles.
Looking up the source code in GIT, I see that your first commit back in May 2011 was the translation of the words: Avvio, Scegli and Arrivo (Begin, Choose, Stop). I really hope that your next commit will be the translation of “Ri-Avvio” since I’m sure you still have a lot to give to QGIS as a community member!
Grazie di cuore!
I will continue to serve on the PSC as chair, and Anita Graser will take over the role of Vice-Chair. The board is completed by our longstanding treasurer Andreas Neumann.
I am also pleased to say that the project governance is in good hands with Jürgen Fischer and Alessandro Pasotti kindly making themselves available to serve on the PSC for another two years.
It is also great to know that our project founder, Gary Sherman, and long-term PSC member Tim Sutton continue to serve on the PSC as honorary PSC members. They both set the standard for our great project culture, and it is great to have his continued presence.
QGIS has been growing from strength to strength, backed by a really amazing community of kind and collaborative users, developers, contributors and funders. I look forward to seeing how it continues to grow and flourish.
The QGIS plugin repository currently lists 1710 plugins and the list keeps on growing. September has been busy with 16 new plugins. It can be challenging to stay up to date.
Our monthly plugin update is meant to provide you a quick overview of the newest plugins. If any of the names or short descriptions piques your interest, you can find the direct link to the plugin page in the table below the screenshot.
This plugin prepares a drone flight path based on input polygon and drone camera parameters. This plugin gives a Fly Litchi compatible csv file with way points for the drone path.
KoALA-Nx supports optimal network analysis in various network environments. Users can apply the tool in all network environments, such as roads, railroads, and pedestrians. KoALA-Nx provides two functions: distance-based network analysis and time-based network analysis
Get name (or ID) of and distance to the nearest feature with greater value in a certain field of a point layer. Returns point layer with added attributes and a line layer with connecting lines.
The QGIS plugin repository currently lists 1694 plugins and the list keeps on growing, even during the holiday season. It can be challenging to stay up to date.
Our new monthly plugin update is meant to provide you a quick overview of the newest plugins. If any of the names or short descriptions piques your interest, you can find the direct link to the plugin page in the table below the screenshot.
We would like to thank the developers, documenters, testers and all the many folks out there who volunteer their time and effort (or fund people to do so). From the QGIS community we hope you enjoy this release! If you wish to donate time, money or otherwise get involved in making QGIS more awesome, please wander along to qgis.org and lend a hand!
QGIS is supported by donors and sustaining members. A current list of donors who have made financial contributions large and small to the project can be seen on our donors list. If you would like to become a sustaining member, please visit our page for sustaining members for details. Your support helps us fund our six monthly developer meetings, maintain project infrastructure and fund bug fixing efforts.
QGIS is Free software and you are under no obligation to pay anything to use it – in fact we want to encourage people far and wide to use it regardless of what your financial or social status is – we believe empowering people with spatial decision making tools will result in a better society for all of humanity.
Understanding which regions QGIS is being used in, which versions are in active use, which platforms it is being used on, and how many users we have is hugely beneficial to our ability as a project to serve our users. Back in 2017 at the bi-annual QGIS hackfest in Nødebo, Denmark, we had a long discussion about key project goals and the need to better understand our user base in order to plan the future direction of the project, and allocate funding and resources to where they are needed most
Typically proprietary software vendors have ready access to detailed user data through telemetry code which they embed in their software. This telemetry code ‘phones home’ key metrics, which together with other techniques such as license sales analysis gives them a very detailed insight into their user base. The data these vendors collect is typically not shared, so their users do not benefit from being able to understand how their data is used.
For QGIS.org, having to resort to what are generally considered to be nefarious and privacy-invading techniques of siphoning user data from our users goes against the ethos we try to promote as an open project. Further, since QGIS is freely available and doesn’t require any self-registration, we do not have a user database we can consult for such analytics. Additional factors make understanding usage levels hard. For example, a single user can download a copy of a QGIS installer and distribute it to many other users, and conversely web crawlers and bots can download many copies of QGIS installers and never install them. Because of this, simply counting the number of downloads from our website does not give a useful picture of our user base.
So we needed to come up with an approach that:
Does not invade our user’s privacy
Does not require including telemetry code in QGIS which exfiltrates user information from their system
Does not store any user-identifiable data on our servers
Is open and transparent in the data collection methodology
Openly shares the insights we gain from our analytics to the broader community
The most obvious privacy-respecting way we could find to understand more about our users was to collect metrics of access to the QGIS News Feed. In order to display the latest news on startup, QGIS Desktop makes a request to https://feed.qgis.org when it is opened. On the server that hosts the feed, we can then use the web server logs to understand which operating system and version of QGIS made the news feed request. Additionally, using the GeoIP library we can resolve each request to the country from which it originated. These pieces of information are included in the User-Agent headers sent by QGIS when it makes a request to the QGIS News Feed.
This process is anonymous, transparent, and simple to disable. It does not identify unique machines. Only one event is logged per unique network per hour. Only one event is logged per QGIS installation per day, and the event is only triggered when the user opens the QGIS Desktop application.
Operating system statistics are derived from QGIS version information, and no system fingerprinting or telemetry is implemented.
Location information is derived from the request source IP address, which is immediately discarded on the server after resolving it to the country of origin.
No logging on the QGIS News Feed server occurs with legacy installations that do not have the news feed feature, offline usage of QGIS, and installations for which feed collection is disabled (see below for info on how to disable it). It will also have statistics skewed in scenarios where atypical networking infrastructure is in effect, such as using a virtual private network.
Despite these caveats, the statistics should provide a good high-level overview of how QGIS is being used, such as the breakdown of QGIS across operating systems and versions – information that is incredibly useful to the QGIS developer team. Only the following four pieces of information are collected:
The date (aggregated by day)
The QGIS version
The Operating System
Country (based on IP which is immediately discarded)
Opting out
If you wish to opt-out of this data collection, simply disabling the feed retrieval, using QGIS offline, or blocking access to the QGIS RSS feed address (feed.qgis.org) on your network will exclude you from this process. QGIS Desktop provides options for disabling version checking and feed access under Settings ➔ Options ➔ General ➔ Application. Note that by default this setting is specific to each individual user profile.
Viewing the analytics
We have made a public dashboard publicly available at https://analytics.qgis.org. The dashboard was made using the fantastic open-source Metabase analytics package.
Credits: This post was written by Charles Dixon-Paver and Tim Sutton
After a long hiatus, we are happy to announce that there will be a another international QGIS Contributor Meeting in conjunction with this year’s FOSS4G in Firenze, Italy from 18 to 22 August 2022.
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. The event is normally three days in duration and we hold two such events each year. 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.
We are extremely pleased to announce the four funded proposals for our 2022 QGIS.ORG grant programme. Funding for the programme was sourced by you, our project donors and sponsors! Note: For more context surrounding our grant programme, please see: QGIS Grants #7: Call for Grant Proposals 2022
With the QGIS Grant Programme 2021, we were able to support eight proposals that are aimed to improve the QGIS project, including software, infrastructure, and documentation. The following reports summarize the work performed in the proposals.
QGIS Server and services documentation (#213) – Report The Services chapter of the QGIS Server documentation needed some love to be effectively representative of the underlying implementation. Numerous services, requests or parameters were not documented at all. Some others also had very sketchy descriptions. Thanks to this QEP, the Services chapter is now in a much better shape!
Rework handling of multi-layer, mixed-format datasets (#216) – Report While the work was partly motivated as an opportunity to clean up some older parts of the QGIS codebase which were fragile and had low test coverage, it has also resulted in many improvements and polish in the QGIS user interface.
Integrate GPS Tools plugin functionality into core QGIS (#217) – Report This grant sees the removal of the old, unmaintained “GPS Tools” core plugin, with all functionality from the plugin moved to reusable Processing algorithms or the unified Data Source Manager dialog. Since the functionality now uses the Processing framework, users gain the ability to run these tools in batch modes, as part of graphical models, and from 3rd party scripts and plugins. As a bonus the new tools are all fully covered by unit tests.
Fixing terrain and camera issues in 3D (#215) – Report These improvements should make the 3D map view easier to use. Especially the camera control issues (unintuitivie camera rotation and wrong center point) were quite tricky to fix.
Thank you to everyone who participated and made this round of grants a great success and thank you to all our sponsor and donors who make this initiative possible!
We recently held our 2021 QGIS Annual General Meeting. The agenda included approval of the annual report and financial report 2020, as well as the new budget for 2022.
