[Qgis-community-team] QGIS - French Ministry of Environment

[Jeremy G]

Jean Roc,

2010/9/26 MORREALE Jean Roc <jr.morreale at enoreth.net>

> Hi, here is a very short resume of a QGIS party that was organized a few
> days ago by the French Ministry of Environment (MEEDDM [1]) to exchange
> informations on Quantum GIS, in order to determine the possibility of
> its use as one of their GIS desktop tools. Most of the participants were
> technical members of the ministry and its local branches, and Vincent
> Picavet (OSGEO-fr treasurer) and I (OSGEO-fr/QGIS).
>
> QGIS is being used internally for months by some of their agents or
> departments in parallel with the actual official tool, which is MapInfo.
> The ministry is ongoing a rationalization of their actual software base,
> leading to the adoption of web gis and the study of alternative desktop
> tools, namely QGIS. This ministry has already switched to OpenOffice and
> changed their Access databases to PostGIS.
>
> No decision has been taken yet but the general opinion on QGIS was
> positive, the ministry's technical teams have already produced
> documentation set for their internal formations and are conducting use
> tests with several services. The main point was to determine if QGIS was
> able to fulfill 100% of MapInfo's uses and the answer was mixed : no on
> some aspects (no "font/annotation" layer type, different proportional
> symbols aka #960, etc.) and far more on others (labelv2, symbology, sql,
> etc.).
>
> Several tests were also done to determine the effort needed to customize
> QGIS, and two tools were developed :
> - SelectPlusFr, a plugin based on Barry ROWLINGSON's SelectPlus
> extending the selection tools
> - OpenWOR, a plugin which allows to partly open .wor file in QGIS (I'll
> post more on that later)
>
> A decision on migrating part of the software base is still to be
> discussed, but the technical team of the ministry already intends to
> contribute code (aforementioned plugins at least) and would like to
> provide financial support to QGIS in some way.
>
> Regards,
> MORREALE Jean Roc
>

These are great news, thanks for keeping us posted. An adoption by an
institution like a minister could lead to a better consideration for QGIS
inside universities, for instance (I'm still facing the old "it's not
serious, it's free software" leitmotiv from University prof. here).

Jeremy
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