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

[Alex Mandel]

On 01/22/2014 02:01 PM, Jeffrey Johnson wrote:
> I setup a quick google spreadsheet to collect emails in lieu of a
> mailing list for now.
> 
> https://docs.google.com/a/boundlessgeo.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AishiXFd06bHdGl4ZE92Y09TbkU1TVBKTm8zMmNmZmc&usp=drive_web#gid=0
> 
> On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 12:50 PM, Jeffrey Johnson
> <jjohnson at boundlessgeo.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>>

There really isn't a procedure that I've seen. I think most people are
served by local user groups of FOSS or GIS origin. North America might
even be too big of a geographic area for what many traditionally call a
user group. I see a good role being to help ensure Birds of a
Feather/Local meets whenever good related conferences roll into town:
FOSS4G, FOSS4GNA, NACIS, State of the Map, URISA (e.g. WAURISA, CalGIS)
etc...

Note the comparison in the EU is the hackfests which is really a lot of
developers and power users getting together to work on QGIS.

>> 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

My personal opinion is that beyond meetups coinciding with other confs,
and possibly organizing QGIS hackfests (can be user oriented) that most
other functions of such a group overlap either with QGIS' existing
infrastructure (e.g. do we really need our own mailing list since the
main QGIS ones are in English except to discuss regional events?) or
OSGeo chapters.

Guess I'm mostly hesitant about splitting the FOSS4G community
mindshare, I don't use QGIS in isolation and never would (unlike some
monolithic software packages), so to me leaving out Postgis, Spatialite,
GRASS, (Everything else in Processing) kinda misses the mark.

But I do get the notion that some things simplified can be more
attractive to a general audience (ie hook in the QGIS users out there
somehow).

Thanks,
Alex