Hi all, The AGIT conference (http://www.agit.at/) was held last week. It is a german speaking conference (application related) but there is also a more scientific english track.
We had a small booth with a poster and laptop and tablet presenting QGIS. People especially liked the ability to deliver content to different media with QGIS: desktop, tablet, phone, web, web services, print. This is definitely a strength we should build on. We also had a workshop on "Cartography with QGIS" with about 35 participants (more than we had PCs in the computer lab). The room was too small for the workshop. Many of the participants did not know QGIS and were quite impressed about the capabilities in symbolization, labeling and the print composer. Next year we have the opportunity to organize a german-speaking QGIS track (one day or half day) at the conference if we have enough presentations. If you would be interesting in contributing (presentation or workshop) please let us know. We will also send out reminders when the call for participation runs. I would also especially be interested in contributions from Austrian QGIS users. QGIS was also present in two of the three keynotes, which was nice to see. In one keynote, unfortunately it was a representation of a complicated desktop GIS (for non GIS-experts) - though the speaker mentioned that the situation is worse with ArcGIS. His message was that most or all of the existing desktop GIS are too complicated for average, non-expert users. Why should the user be bothered by complicated CRS/EPSG codes? Why is zooming and panning so slow compared to Google maps? Why are the dialogues so complicated? Obviously it is not so easy to reach out to both experts (with a lot of options) and the occasional user or newbie. He also presented a small Android mobile GIS for people in Africa who can report illegal forest activities with the GPS-powered device. A GIS for people who cannot even read and write, made with simple dialogues with only images instead of text to choose. Anita, Werner or Stefan - can you please add your own impressions from the conference? Andreas _______________________________________________ Qgis-user mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user
