Quantum GIS community

Current environment and opportunities for contribution from Asia

Paolo Cavallini

cavallini@faunalia.it http://www.faunalia.it

QGIS current status

• Going strong

Going strong

How does it work?

No dictatorship

• democracy (decision by consensus)
• PSC: only rare decisions (mainly on finances)
• HackFests
  • how they work
  • results
  • costs
  • sponsors

QGIS Tools

Where is the community?

• mailing list
• Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel
• bugtracker
• StackExchange
• http://plugins.qgis.org
• GitHub
• lulu.com

Who pays?

• Donors
• Sponsors
• Customers
• Volunteers

Widespread use

• Uneven participation
• This is bad
  • less resources, slower development
  • more important: less understanding of users needs
    • ex.: problems with non-american characters and local projections

What you can do

Let us know your problems, share your solutions

• participate to the mailing lists
  • need to localize? Pros and cons
• participate to IRC
• send case studies
• keep on with the good work on translations (website, manual)
  • new infrastructure http://translate.qgis.org

What you can do

• Write code
  • and send it upstream (never keep it local)
  • unit tests for non-american characters
• Develop thriving local ecosystems
  • build up companies to offer support, training, bugfixes, etc. for enterprises, local and central government, etc.
  • free software can be commercial
  • we're here to help!
  • and remember to give back

Specific actions

Time for your ideas: you know your environment

• synchronized HackFests
  • not only developers
  • translators
  • power users
  • for testing and management of bugs
  • no problems with time zones
  • in preparation: USA/Canada, Australia

QGIS Day

Done in several European countries

• quite successful
• good place to
  • show your results
  • build technical partnership and commercial relationships
  • boost the community
  • raise funds for specific tasks
  • ...more!

Other ideas

• QGIS ambassador?
  • helps overcoming language and cultural issues
  • facilitate long lasting relationships
• Prize for best contribution?
  • to stimulate pushing code upstream
• Other, better ones? Please speak up

In QGIS, every user counts

Happy free mapping!

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