[Qgis-psc] QGIS Hackfest press release

[Tim Sutton]

Hi Pablo

> On 29 Oct 2015, at 19:03, Pablo Fernández Moniz <pablofernandezmoniz at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi!
> 
>  We are preparing a press release for local press and University community talking about the hackfest and to try to divulge QGIS.
> 
>  Could you please provide me a small description about the project, people involved and their careers, and some projects/ companies which uses QGIS.


How about this:

The QGIS project (http://qgis.org) is an open source project devoted to the development of a best-in-class Geographical Information System (GIS). In almost every pursuit and field, there is a spatial element. For example town engineers need to know accurately where the infrastructure they manage is, humanitarian aid workers need to understand where safe places to house refugees are, land managers need to know where land parcels are so they can assure citizens of their land tenure and so on. Numerous proprietary software solutions exist that can cater to these needs but they are expensive to purchase and maintain and do not offer a sustainable solution – particularly in developing nations and cash strapped organisations where the licensing costs of proprietary GIS can make the difference between being able to embark on a separate project or fail. The recent global crisis has further highlighted this issue where even in more wealthy and developed nations austerity measures have forced organisations to seek out more economic solutions for their GIS needs. There is more than just an economic imperative driving the adoption of open source GIS solutions such as QGIS.  Security concerns, data privacy concerns, open standards adoption, long term access to software and software source codes, the ability to easily improve the software and incorporate new functionality and a myriad of similar concerns have been causing organisations to re-evaluate their dependence on commercial proprietary GIS solutions.

Driven by these factors and because we offer a compelling alternative, QGIS has garnered a substantial user base (our estimate is between 250,000 and 500,000 users).  Our software encompasses desktop, server-side and web client applications along with foundational libraries for software developers. Our software is mature (the first release was made in 2002) and supported by a very active developer, documentation and user community, a large proportion of whom participate in the project on a volunteer basis. A subset of our developer community work for consulting firms where they provide QGIS related services such as development of new features, fixing of bugs, writing plugins and so on. Within the open source model, these improvements are generally (subject to review from the QGIS developer community) contributed back to the upstream QGIS project.

QGIS is used by many companies and organisations around the world including a the WorldBank / GFDRR, numerous local and regional governments in Germany, Switzerland and many other countries around the world. It is also used by data journalists (e.g. from the LA Times), NGO’s, and people from nearly every sector of civil society.

QGIS is built by a community of contributors from around the world. Our community members are not only software programmers, but also documentation writers, translators (QGIS is available in over 20 languages), testers and users who provide support to other users.


Regards

Tim


> 
>  KR!
> 
> --
> 
> Pablo Fernández Moniz
> 

—





Tim Sutton

Visit http://kartoza.com <http://kartoza.com/> to find out about open source:

* Desktop GIS programming services
* Geospatial web development
* GIS Training
* Consulting Services

Skype: timlinux Irc: timlinux on #qgis at freenode.net
Tim is a member of the QGIS Project Steering Committee

Kartoza is a merger between Linfiniti and Afrispatial

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