North River Geographic Systems Inc

Spatial Problem Solving

Training

New Training Classes on QGIS

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I know – possibly my most failed blog topic as I talk about this a lot and never get anything done.

Well – I finally got something done. Well almost done. The first part of January found me in Denver Colorado teaching a 3 day QGIS class for SolSpec  covering the ins and outs of QGIS. I have a 1 day intro class that has made the rounds for about 5 years. It’s well tested and works and hasn’t been adjusted much except for changes to the software.

I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley.

Now that I’m back and have a chance to reviews notes on what went well and what didn’t – I’m announcing two more classes to round out the QGIS trilogy: QGIS II and QGIS III. I want to call the whole thing: QGIS, A New Hope, QGIS Strikes Back, and Revenge of QGIS. I won’t as I don’t want sued out of existence.

Anyway – the next two days cover:

  • Project settings
  • Raster and vector tools
  • Processing
  • Processing modeler
  • Analysis tools
  • Maybe some python – I’m undecided on this one for day 3.

I end this all by pointing at PostGIS and yelling a lot. Well – not really yelling but pointing wildly.

Keenesburg Colorado

Why didn’t I do this years ago? I actually work more on client projects more than I teach but there’s been a pretty big upswing in people asking for training on QGIS. So I’m currently reworking parts and portions and getting ready to push this two more days out the door. As far as Pricing I’m working on a 3 day package deal for people and pricing for organizations.

Introduction to QGIS Class in Chattanooga – 1st Quarter 2019

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…or somewhere close.  The QGIS class may be just outside of Downtown or in some trendy part where we can eat lunch. At some point……yeah I know nothing like specifics.

Due to popular demand – I’m actually going to attempt a QGIS Class locally. There are some people I’ve emailed BUT in the hope of more people I’m including a form for you to put some information so we can figure out when it’s a good time to hold the class. Everyone has different schedules and maybe this doesn’t happen, or it does happen, or it happens twice. Yeah – I know. This should happen early in 2019 and I’ll give everyone enough time to plan – but I need to know interest before I start putting this together.

Anyway – this will be the 1 day QGIS Workshop and this will be a “certified” class as we will throw money back towards the QGIS community. Price will be $325 for 1 day. Food not included. Fun included. Bring some questions, a laptop, and other things and we’ll learn something. I’m hoping for between 7 to 10 people.

A tale of two FOSS4G meetings

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In the Spring of 2017 I had a small FOSS4G meeting in Knoxville TN and the general feeling after it finished was “When are we doing this again?”. So the conversation started and surprise – we had two meetings.

The first meeting happened in Knoxville on August 13th 2018. We had 9 presentations. The big headache I had with this meeting is it all comes down to sponsorship. I wanted it cheap – but I didn’t want to do in the hole again to do this. So we had sponsors. We also had a $10 dollar charge that could be offset with a scholarship if needed.

We had right around 50 people and covered everything from postgis tricks to measuring vegetation in the Great Smokey Mountains with LIDAR.

The second meeting was in Huntsville Alabama on August 14th 2018. The GIS Association of Alabama stepped forwarded and covered all the expenses. There was no charge for this one.

Fifty people came from the North End of the State to hear about QGIS, working with FOSS4G tools, and Jupyter Notebooks.

So what is the point? Actually is there a point? I sat around most of the day playing with how I wanted to summarize these two meetings. Meetings like this are hard. You have catering, a worry no one will show up, and a bigger worry no one will come and speak. We gave close to 100 people a chance to see something different. Which was double of what we did last year.

When I first started going to GIS meetings back in 1995 it was exciting. People would get up and speak and we’d all compare notes and figure out that we were all wrestling with the same problems. We were writing AMLS and buying workstations and digitizing old maps. Everyone had some sort of ESRI based user group. Maybe they were Intergraph. Maybe they had bought other software.

Flash forward to now and I’m consulting and not working for the Feds. User group meetings have morphed into these multi day extravaganzas that meet in your area…possibly not. You have to budget time and hotel reservations and it’s just a pain. So you end up not talking to your fellow geo people….or as we saw over the last two days people with specialties where geo is another trick in the bag.  Of course there is twitter and slack and facebook and linkedin and 100 different ways to talk to one another. What if you don’t?

So lets have a meeting centered around FOSS4G……or meetings. They don’t have to cost much. Maybe they cost $10 a person. Maybe they are free.  For Knoxville I poured about 2 to 3 hours a week over the course of 3 months…so about 40 hours. It wasn’t that hard – get a few people together and it’s less difficult. Find a low cost/free location. Huntsville had theirs in a courtroom. Knoxville had theirs at the University.

So in 2018 – I would like to get people together to talk about FOSS4G. Maybe you have a friend with a commercial solution in place for his organization. Maybe they have nothing. I think ESRI owes a large part of their success from the early days of getting people together to talk. We can do the same for QGIS/PostGIS/Geoserver/GDAL/etc. It’s a big world out there – you can mix and match about everything. I may not be able to make a North America Meeting (FOSS4GNA). Maybe these smaller meetings can scratch an itch for people and I can do that instead.

There’s no one to tell me I can’t. So what am I going next year? Workshops and a meeting in Knoxville. It sounds like the same thing will happen in Huntsville.

Intro to QGIS Training – September 25th 2018 – Montgomery Alabama

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The Intro to QGIS class is going to Alabama! Actually – Montgomery Alabama September 25th 2018.

It was picked to start off the Alabama Damage Summit. Also – with much luck this will be certified! Actually – there is no luck about it. It’s a certified class. Which means approximately 25 dollars per student goes back to the QGIS Organization.

Anyway – if you’re coming to the conference sign up! If you’re not ding the conference organizers and maybe you can attend. The more the merrier at this event.

What will we cover?

    1. QGIS Community
    2. Navigating the Interface
    3. Data and Symbology
    4. Geoprocessing and Plugins
    5. Editing
    6. Layout Manager
    7. Databases

The Database section might change a bit depending on time constraints. It should be a blast – so come down/up/over/back and learn some new software.

FOSS4GNA 2018

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I love a good road trip. FOSS4GNA was in St Louis Missouri this year. Close enough for me to get in the car and tune out for 5 to 6 hours.

First thing on the Agenda – QGIS.  I did the 4 hour “Intro to QGIS” for about 60 something people. You had people who had worked around gis for a good while and were curious about this Open Source desktop. You had some people who had been using it and had questions. Overall it was a bit much with that many people – but worth the effort. I hope everyone walked out with something new they didn’t know. I was inspired – 4 years ago you’d scream “QGIS” and there were a few who knew. I think this year I’ve taught the 4 hour class to about 100 people. This is going well – watch for QGIS Part II coming shortly. I’m hopeful to do the 8 hour one at some point. Seriously – I know you people love 3.5 hours of me talking but the 8 hours of me talking is magnificent (it’s actually not).

I did a really technical “Copy and paste” of the paper abstracts as listed on the website and filtered out a few words that were throwing everything off.  You could pick and poke and over analyze this very happy looking word cloud a bunch – I wouldn’t. Do notice the giant work “DATA” in the middle of it though. There is a very small word: GIS. So I’ve gotten the question several times over the last bit “Why go to this one?”. My consulting life has taken a very data centric turn and to deal with that data I use open source tools. So I spend a lot of time talking to people at the conference. I spend time talking to the developers who make the software I like…at this conference. This one scratches an itch for me. There are a lot of smart people. It’s a good thing. if I go to an event and have all the answers what’s the point in going. So what I walked out with is this following:

  • I never heard “Big Data” – it was just data. The implication was there for it to be big. Hence you hear a lot of Machine Learning. I have only used machine learning in terrible Terminator Jokes and being snarky. It’s time to give it a look. It’s also time for all this machine learning to do a proper reboot of the Terminator franchise..
  • Python is my nemesis. I need to spend more time with it. If I heard that one word once I heard it half a dozen times. Which – no big deal it’s a tech conference but for me it stuck out more than usual. Maybe I’m more self conscience about it these days. If I count every programming thing I’ve ever done that has stuck – so far it’s been bash shell scripting from 26 years ago (that’s not even programming so much). I’ve just got to force myself into more cases where I have to use python.
  • All this machine learning is turning it’s collective head towards imagery. In a conference where I don’t hear a ton of “Raster” or just ignore it – suddenly raster was in my face everywhere.
  • Geopackage    – I feel like I’ve spent over a year going “PLEASE DON’T LET ME BE WRONG ABOUT GEOPACKAGE”. After this conference – I found it mentioned multiple times and the over arching theme seemed to be “it’s a thing now so deal with it”. With QGIS switching to geopackage as the default data format – I expect this grow over the rest of 2018.
  • I found myself walking in and out of conversations constantly. Sometimes I meant to stick my head in – sometimes the conversation found me. I missed several talks just for the fun of talking to other users/developers.
  • The nice thing with this open source software – there are smart people working on it. So what happens when you need improvements to the software? GDAL Barn Raising.   How much hay did they raise? 140k worth. So there are much needed improvements coming to gdal. It’s noteworthy looking at the companies that contributed. Yes ESRI is in there. So if you ever wondered – they see the value of the improvements. Open source GIS touches a lot of software.

Other noteworthy things:

  • Someone said “there’s a line at the women’s restroom”. If you stopped and took a look around – there were more women at this conference. I don’t have a number. There were more. There were about 527 total humans registered at the conference. I will guess higher than 35% for women. No numbers to back me up so deal with it.
  • The second thing I do is go look at a mirror and walk out and look at the crowd. I’m tired of seeing white middle aged balding bearded glasses wearing people at conferences. There were people of color at this conference. The colors varied. Not everyone was like me and that was a good thing.

If there was a keynote that stuck out – it was the final one.

Chris Holmes brought the conference to an end with a discussion…of….well….Deep Learning…Machine learning….imagery……..the idea of a queryable earth.  In other words there’s enough imagery being taken you should be able to “ask” it questions. Planet Labs it pulling down something like 10 terrabytes of imagery a day. One snapshot of the earth. A DAY. So train the computers to classify the imagery and start asking questions.

There was a lot more that happened. Walking across St Louis at night. Food. City Park. Talking to total strangers. Meeting random people I bump into over the interwebs and hassling them. I stuck my foot in the Mississippi River. I got to play Geohipster for a day and tweet random insanity.  Having served on multiple conference committees – I find I’m happier not on them.  This was a good event. I enjoyed it. I walked away feeling overwhelmed and hopeful for the path I’m barely scratching after 26 years. So where is FOSS4GNA in 2019? Stay Tuned.

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