[Qgis-community-team] Organizing a US / North American User Group

[Jeffrey Johnson]

This is awesome. Thanks for all the info. Im open to trying all of
these things here in the US (including sponsorship). Thanks very much!

On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 1:14 PM, Andreas Neumann <a.neumann at carto.net> wrote:
> Hi Jeff,
>
> I chime an with the perspective of the Swiss QGIS user group - which was
> founded after a series of QGIS user meetings in Switzerland 2 years ago.
>
> The goals of our group are:
>
> * coordination of development (in Switzerland but also globally)
> * QGIS information: meetings, articles in GIS magazines, QGIS
> information on Twitter, SWISS GIS discussion boards, etc.
> * QGIS sponsoring: we collect an annual membership fee. This fee is used
> to sponsor either QGIS in general or the development of specific
> features. We have about 15k US$ available per year, at the current stage
> which we use either for paid bug fixing or for the development of
> specific features
> * initialization of application modules (like waste-water, urban
> planning, surveying, etc. - of course this needs professional
> development involving companies)
> * organization of the annual or bi-annual QGIS user meetings. We started
> in 2010 and had four meetings until 2013.
> * establishment of interest groups. Currently we have a waste-water
> interest group and we want to establish a QGIS server/web client
> interest group
>
> We have a small steering committee with three people (president,
> financial, secretary) and a fourth member who just started and will work
> on website and marketing.
>
> our Website was included in the old qgis.org website and still can be
> found at http://www.qgis.ch/ - here are the status for memberships:
> http://old.qgis.org/images/qgis_usergroups/switzerland/statutes_qgis_user_group_switzerland_version_2012-02.pdf
> - luckily they are in english - so you can read them ;-) - we are
> currently migrating this to a new website until beginning of March.
>
> I think the idea of memberships with an annual membership fee is
> interesting as you can collect a steady and growing crowd-funding
> initiative that can be used to positively influence the QGIS project. As
> an example we invested 5k Euro to pay a developer to work two weeks on
> dedicated bug fixing. Or we co-fund Martin Dobias to work on the
> multithreaded rendering system to be integrated in QGIS 2.4. We also
> co-funded Matthias Kuhns work on the table relations (1:n).
>
> Governmental organizations and companies are used to pay membership fees
> for associations or lobbying organizations - so why not doing something
> similar for QGIS? 300 or 500 US$ a year does not hurt, depending on the
> organizations or companies size. They get the added value of the
> crowd-funding initiative that helps to steer QGIS development and raise
> the quality by paid bug-fixing.
>
> I hope this experience from the Swiss QGIS user groups can help in other
> countries to maybe organize something similar. Together we could have
> more resources: for know-how exchange, coordination, but also financially.
>
> Andreas
>
> Am 22.01.2014 21:50, schrieb Jeffrey Johnson:
>> Hi Folks,
>>
>> It seems like a good time to get a US / North American User Group
>> going since there has been a serious uptick in interest in QGIS on
>> this side of the Atlantic. I've talked to quite a few people privately
>> about this, but figured now is the time to bring it to the wider user
>> community.
>>
>> So, my employer (Boundless Geo) would like to help organize an
>> inaugural User Group Meeting on April 11th, the day before the State
>> of the Map Conference in Washington DC. This seems like a good
>> opportunity to get everyone together when lots of spatially minded
>> people will be in town. The consensus is that we could arrange space
>> in the District during the day and have a happy hour nearby that
>> night.
>>
>> I'm not sure what the procedure is for organizing a User Group (or if
>> there even is one), but we can take on the tasks of setting up a
>> mailing list, website etc. If the PSC can let us know what hoops we
>> should jump through, or things we should think about, please let us
>> know. We will be reaching out to lots of people who are very excited
>> about QGIS but haven't really joined the community and try to get the
>> involved.
>>
>> Please contact me off-list if you are interested in helping with this
>> effort and as soon as we get a mailing list going I'll follow up with
>> a link here.
>>
>> Hoping to see some of you in DC in April!
>>
>> Jeff
>> _______________________________________________
>> Qgis-community-team mailing list for organizing community resources such as documentation, translation etc..
>> Qgis-community-team at lists.osgeo.org
>> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-community-team
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Qgis-community-team mailing list for organizing community resources such as documentation, translation etc..
> Qgis-community-team at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-community-team