QGIS is the most popular and used Geographical Free Open Source software in the whole world, growing fast and being a serious competitor to the near monopolistic proprietary alternative. QGIS is born in 2002 thanks to Gary Sherman that was looking for a simple way to visualize geospatial data stored in a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database. In the following years more people got involved in the project and QGIS stared to become a complete GIS software with support for both vector and raster data. During these 18 years more and more people developed specialized geospatial algorithm to extract information from the data and to provide a simple interface for the end user. Different milestones have been reached, e.g. the support for thirdly part software, like GRASS, SAGA, Orfeo Toolbox and R; a Python interface has been added so that it is easy to develop new spatial algorithms as *plugins*. Thanks to these features QGIS quickly became popular and widespread. Public administration, private companies, Universities and GIS expert use QGIS and are investing resources back to the project. The success of QGIS is due not only to work of developers and the resulting powerful and easy functions, but also to the strong community behind the software: document writers, translators participate not only *building* QGIS as a software but by growing QGIS as a **community**.

1. QGIS: Software
and Community
Paolo Cavallini
QGIS.ORG & Faunalia

2. Started 2002 as a Postgis
viewer and today it is:
●
the most popular Open Source Desktop GIS
●
the second most popular GIS after ESRI ArcGIS
●
translated in 48 languages
●
available for Linux, Windows, MacOS and Android
●
released every 4 months with LTR releases every year
●
an amazing cartography toolkit with Atlas and report generation
●
a powerful analysis and model builder platform with Processing
●
a mobile data collection solution for Android / Windows (QField, QGIS Roam)
●
a platform for developers to build custom solutions
●
a web OGC server with ease of use for styling, labeling and printing data
●
comes with several web clients: LizMap, QWC 2, GISQUICK and more

3. QGIS searches on Google
(world)
Source: https://trends.google.com/

4. QGIS searches on Google
(France)
Source: https://trends.google.com/

5. QGIS searches on Google
(Spain)
Source: https://trends.google.com/

6. QGIS Website traffic
(from Cloudflare)
● How much traffic does the QGIS website
serve per month?
● How many unique visitors do we have
per month?
● What are the top 5 countries accessing
QGIS.ORG (total N of requests)?
> 100 TB
> 750.000
US, FR, DE, IT, BR

7. QGIS Website traffic
(from Cloudflare)

8. QGIS Website traffic
(statistics from Cloudflare)
Release of QGIS 3.6

9. What makes QGIS a success?
It’s the people
It’s you as a user and
you as a contributor
It’s the Internet and collaboration
tools that we can use
It’s the people
It’s you as a user and
you as a contributor
It’s the Internet and collaboration
tools that we can use

10. Wants to be user friendly, inclusive, respectful and welcoming to users, contributors and developers.
QGIS.ORG has a code of conduct: https://qgis.org/en/site/getinvolved/governance/codeofconduct/codeofconduct.html

11. So what are these people
contributing?
● translating QGIS, docs & website
● documenting, creating training material
● testing & submitting bug reports
● developing new features
● fixing bugs & issues
● maintaining the QGIS IT infrastructure
● maintaining Github PR
● reviewing developer contributions
● maintaining Travis CI (continuous integration)
● maintaining issues (bugs & feature requests)
● releasing QGIS & packaging
● teaching QGIS, creating courses
● reviewing training material and certificates
● writing plugins
● managing plugin submissions
● donating & sponsoring
● accounting, sponsor management
● running user groups
● organizing local events
● organizing dev meetings
● helping users on stackexchange, IRC
& mail
● social media & PR
● tutoring new contributors for all of
the above tasks

12. Some of our contributors

13. time
functionality
development
2.10
2.12
2.14
2.16
2.18
3.0
3.2
3.4
(2.13)
(2.11)
(2.15)
(2.17)
(2.99)
(3.1)
(3.3)
new feature
bug fix
LTR
LTR
Jürgen Fischer, Kyngchaos, Peter
Petrik, Oslandia and others.
See Road-Map
QGIS Release Management

15. Voting members
● Elect
○ QGIS PSC
○ QGIS Board
○ QGIS Chair
○ Financial Auditors
● Decide on
○ QGIS grant proposals
○ Any other matters that need community decisions
● Approve
○ Yearly report of chair
○ Financial report of past year
○ Budget of upcoming year

16. Marco Bernasocchi Anita Graser
Paolo Cavallini Gary Sherman Andreas Neumann
Richard Duivenvoorde Jürgen Fischer
Tim Sutton
PSC & Honorary Members

17. Infrastructure Management

18. QGIS Income
151’000 €

19. QGIS Expenses
179’000 €

20. QGIS developer meetings

21. QGIS meetings & conferences

22. QGIS User Groups

23. QGIS User Groups: local
ambassadors
● Local representation of QGIS.ORG in your country
● Organize user meetings and workshops
● Collect case studies and best practice examples
● Local networking and know-how exchange
● Inform their members on “what’s going on at QGIS.ORG worldwide”
● Share know-how and tips & tricks
● Organize crowd-funding to cater to the needs of their members (or
contribute globally)
● Help sponsor QGIS.ORG

24. Challenges of the project
● QGIS is developed “bottom up” - driven by users demands (vs. “top down”
initial development model of gvSIG or ESRI ArcGIS)→
● QGIS.ORG does not have any employees no direct influence of board→
and PSC on developers
● QGIS developers run their own businesses or are employed by companies
active in FOSSGIS
● Bug fixing and Quality Assurance (see next slide)
● Documentation (manual, API, Python cookbook)
● QGIS.ORG funds are quite limited: ~ 150k € per year
● QGIS.ORG has very limited marketing resources

25. Quality assurance efforts
● Unit tests now required for core classes
○ Also ask your dev to include unit tests in quotes
● All changes are first made with git pull requests
● Test suite for Processing
● Automated code scans against race conditions (Coverity)
● Continuous integration with Travis
○ See green checkmark or red cross at Github
● QEP (QGIS enhancement proposals):
○ Proposals for larger changes with discussions
○ https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/issues
● New QGIS devs
○ Are mentored - Peer code reviews from core devs
○ Devs need to agree to guidelines, esp. when they become core contributors

26. So, come and join us!