It came and went quickly.
To recap: an evil plan was hatched 3 years ago and this was the the final strategic move – a QGIS conference. The local community college gave me a room and people donated and it happened.
The night before the meeting we had a social at the Tap House. Fun story on that – I had to make a run to the airport to pick up one more attendee. As I was walking out the door I told the Bartender “Hey I’ll pick up drinks because I can’t imagine there will be more than 8 people here”. When I walked back in the door we had 25 people. Getting 25 people together anywhere to discuss QGIS is a pretty big deal – especially for Chattanooga. Oh yeah – Guido Stein (President of OSGEO us) completely saved me from washing dishes before the end of the night.
So lets talk about the conference. 11 talks. 44 people. We covered Parcels. We discussed Plugins. We had Nyall Dawson tune in from Australia for a 1 hour discussion of QGIS. We discussed using other applications with QGIS. We had Jody Garnett fly in from Canada. We handed out Coffee Mugs. We had books as prizes. We have Videos coming also – I was able to afford for someone to come in and video this.
Lets talk about the attendees. I do these for two reasons: community and “Is anyone interested in FOSS4G Software?”. There is always interest. The QGIS meeting showed me there was way more interest than I could have imagined. As far as attendees went we had people from: New York, Virginia, California, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, and Canada. Which means we were “international”. Of course it’s hard to gauge for local use of QGIS since very few people were local….and that’s completely fine.
Best Compliment I received: I learned a lot and felt really accepted in the community.
So we’ve got a thing. There seemed to be support for doing this next year. I need to get this more organized – because everyone had fun. All of you that attended and sent me emails, tweets, sponsored, and other encouragement made this happen – Thank You.
