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

[Andreas Neumann]

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
>