[OSGeo-Discuss] Poland Chapter activity

[Milena Nowotarska]

Dear All,

After the lecture of latest OSGeo Journal I would like the community
to hear what has been going on in Poland in the last year, so let me
write a short unofficial Poland Chapter Report.

2010 is the second year of Poland Chapter activity. We have localized
QGIS, GRASS, gvSIG and lately gvSIG mobile GUI and we try to keep
translations on very high level for every release of the software.
This is work done by up to 3 people per project and entirely on
volunteer basis. With the chapter's presence at several conferences, plus the
creation and maintaining of a related Polish online forum we have encouraged
many people to use FOSS4G for their daily work.

The 2nd OSGeo-PL Conference "Open Software for Geodesy and Geoinformation
Science" [1] was a great success and attracted about 160 participants.
For the conference, we have prepared free GRASS and QGIS workshops and
we were surprised by the number of attendees, which encouraged us to make
two GRASS and one QGIS workshops in total, 2 hours each.

Large interest of the Polish community in GRASS GIS was filled recently
with yet another GRASS workshop [2] which gave us the possibility to meet
and discuss about GRASS needs. As soon as the last student left, the
workshop turned itself into unofficial GRASS hackfest. We are willing
to hold an official one next year.

Also Quantum GIS is gaining great, perhaps the bigest popularity which
can be seen on Polish forum [3] and presence at several conferences [4].

>From 3 years, the idea of FOSS4G is present on annual geodetic
conference in Wisła [5]. It was also present at GIS post-diploma
studies all over the country, but starting form this year not only as
lectures but workshop as well. The first QGIS workshop was made at
Wroclaw University of Environmental and Life Sciences using Arramagong
Virtual Machine on "click2try" (and it went surprisingly well as for the
first serious cloud computing experience of mine!). Now we are invited
by the oldest GIS post-diploma studies held by Wroclaw Technical
University [6] for a block of FOSS4G lectures and workshops which will
take almost 8% of the total studies hours. I think it is a lot when
having in mind how big the field of GIS is.

We are now busy preparing presentations and workshops for GIS Day [7]
and looking forward to 4th Quantum GIS Hackfest, which will start in a
week (!) in Wrocław [8].

I would like to thank my OSGeo-PL friends Robert Szczepanek, Borys
Jurgiel, Piotr Pachół, Paweł Netzel and Maciek Sieczka for their
effort in making world a better FOSS4G place.


Best,
Milena


[1] http://www.gislab.up.wroc.pl/wogis2010/en/
[2] http://www.wgug.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=36:scientific-workshop-2010-qspatial-analysis-with-grassq&catid=2:warsztaty&Itemid=5
[3] http://forum.quantum-gis.pl/
[4] http://mapywsieci.pl/
[5] http://www.wodgik.katowice.pl/konferencja/2010/
[6] http://gis.pwr.wroc.pl/start.php
[7] http://www.gisday.uw.edu.pl/start.php
[8] http://www.qgis.org/wiki/4._QGIS_Hackfest_in_Wroclaw_2010

-- 
Milena Nowotarska
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Milena_Nowotarska
http://quantum-gis.pl/     ||     http://grass-gis.pl/
http://www.qgis.org/wiki/4._QGIS_Hackfest_in_Wroclaw_2010