[Qgis-developer] Impressions from the FOSS4G2006 conference in Lausanne

[humarco]

Dear qgis developers,

From 12th - 15th September, there has been the FOSS4G conference (see 
http://www.foss4g2006.org). For those of us who couldn't go there, I'd 
like to write down some of my impressions.

It was a very good conference with lots of interesting workshops and talks. 
The location at the university of Lausanne was close to the lake and with a 
beautifull view to the mountains. There have been a lot of interesting people 
to talk with from the mapserver, GRASS, PostGIS, JAVA-GIS and last but not 
least QGIS communities. Speaking to those people, I was pleased to see how 
widely known, accepted and even used QGIS is in the whole open source GIS 
community. I also heared the wish of many users that 0.8 release happens in 
not too far future.

From QGIS side, there where two workshops: a 'QGIS beginers workshop' where 
the main program features have been showed and a 'QGIS plugin writer 
workshop' where a plugin has been written in four small steps. Tim, is there 
a place on the website where I may place the material of this workshop 
(slides, code for the four steps)? The plugin itself might even be usefull, 
it takes the features of the current vectorlayer and converts them into a 
delimited text file such that every vertex becomes a point feature.

It was further impressive for me to visit the presentation about the 'udig' 
project and to see that "competitors do not sleep" (like we use to say in 
german). They seem to have most features that we have in QGIS and 
additionally a very good support for OGC services. It seemed that they also 
have a lot of human ressources for future development.

There was also information about the OSGeo foundation, what it does and how a 
project may become a member. This so-called 'incubation process' is mainly a 
project review. When reading the criterias for projects 
(https://incubator.osgeo.org/), I had the impression, that the QGIS project 
would fullfill most or even all of them.

Ok, that was it from my side. Did anyone of the QGIS folks make digital 
pictures of the conference? It would be great to see them.

Mateusz: thank you very much for the nice QGIS t-shirt!

Greetings,
Marco