TNGIC

Recap of the TNGIC Conference of 2022

Back on Feb 12th of 2020 I was sitting in Virginia at a conference going “Yeah I dunno – this whole virus thing sounds weird”. Two years later I was walking into Montgomery Bell State Park at the first in-person conference I’ve been to since Feb 12th 2020. I can be and usually am gloriously wrong. Covid was slightly more than weird. Sometime last year I declared “I think in person conferences are done”. That’s not the case either.

I could tell you a lot about the conference: Talks about geo, software, trials and tribulations of the last 2 years. I’m not. I needed a break. I checked out for most of the conference. Normally I hate going to Montgomery Bell but this time it was different. It’s 5000 acres of State Park and it’s pretty nice and quiet. So all those emails I had to rush down to my room to deal with was me sitting on the balcony not answering email. Take that College kids who wanted to know about GIS from a professional. That’s how I do it.

So what stuck out for me in this conference – the discussion of the “conference”. In general everyone was pretty happy to be in the same area and trading notes and talking (possibly trading covid – we will know shortly). There was talk of working remote which a lot of people had done for 6 months at least. Some still were remote. Some were never going back in the office.

If you divide the group into thirds here is how it felt to me:

The last two years of being remote wasn’t any fun.
The last two years of being remote was awesome.
In person is good. Remote is also good. I’m not committing to anything.

How did I conduct this scientific poll? Walking around talking to people.

I fall into the last “non-committal” group. Why? The 2021 FOSS4G meeting – the amount of knowledge coming out of that recorded for the masses was incredible. …but….it’s hard to get nuance if you’re not talking to someone face to face. So – in person is better….BUT……I attended one conference in Britain “live”….so remote……

One person had rigged up his camper trailer to allow him to travel and work. One other person I spoke with had done quite a bit of traveling while remote. One person I spoke with went home for a few months and then were back in the office because – the whole reason they were there was the job was the site and the site was the job. Remote didn’t work for them.

One email this morning announced a new discord server for a user group. Another group has slack. Another still relies on email. People as always are making the best out of what they know even if it doesn’t work for everyone. I sorta hate slack and love email. There’s a whole group younger than myself that loves Discord. Email is still the lowest common denominator for about everyone. Communication – it’s a little bit complicated.

Anyway – it’s still weird out there. I look forward to it remaining weird moving forward. Do conferences go back to “normal” – I sort of hope they don’t continue like it’s 2019. Viva Remote. Viva in person.

QGIS Class at TNGIC

So to break the silence and this is something I should have done much sooner – I’ll be at the TN Geographic Information Council Conference holding a QGIS workshop and possibly talking about QGIS and a client’s implementation of QGIS/PostGIS/Geoserver later in the conference.

Anyway – show up for this:http://www.tngic.org/2019-conference.htm#preconferencetraining if you’ve had questions on QGIS and didn’t know what to do or who to ask or anything else – show up.

QGIS – it’s what all the cool kids are doing.

I will even speak some insanity. Don’t tell anyone but I’ll encourage you to show up up for it even if you didn’t sign up for it. Bring a friend. Sneak in. I will tell no one. Seriously. Bring a laptop and I’ll have QGIS and the data and the presentation on a Thumb Drive. We’ll be using Chattanooga data and making this TN/Chattanooga Centric.

I’ll see you there. We’ll have more crazy to talk about once we shut the door so one can hear us.

20 minutes at the East TN TNGIC Meeting

I went through a year or so of not talking at conferences. For local ones I’d show up and do something. I taught a workshop at FOSS4GNA 2018. I did a workshop at FOSS4G 2017 in Boston (and it sorta sucked). I need to get out of that mode and talk more – but I’m happier being quiet these days and working with clients.

Anyway – at FOSS4GNA 2018 I discovered something – the OSGEO Suite had disappeared from Boundless’s Website and was replaced with a github repository. It wasn’t long after Don Meltz put up an excellent explanation of the OSGEO Suite. The OSGEO Suite being gone isn’t a problem. It does increase the amount of talking I have to do spend explaining it’s not a problem. I could even compile the suite – but my clients can’t. They are smart people – but the time to compile the boundless suite won’t be happening.

One of the things I keep running into is the idea of an Open Source Server. The OSGEO Suite was well known and I get people asking “Hey – can you set us up a geo server”. They mean the opengeo suite. I then launch into an explanation of what makes up a “geo server” and they go a bit blank and answer me “Yeah – one of those”.

So for the next bit I’m gonna be doing something like this:

I want to explain how this works to people. We’ve gotten a bit deaf by hearing “ArcServer” at every conference in TN as this one monolithic thing you have to install to make a web map…which really don’t need since AGOL appeared but…you want SDE and it’s not called that and you have two people editing but you need SQl Server but you don’t….

Anyway, QGIS/PostgreSQL/PostGIS I’ve installed multiple times and as of late I’m experimenting with geoserver and what it can/can’t do. I have no grand delusions of creating ‘Randy’s Open Geo Spatial Super Duper Server’. I want to get to the point where maybe mapserver is an option in this. So much to learn…so little time.

I suck at github – but I’ve been more active as I try to develop a skill set and get over the angst of pushing and pulling things. I’ve built a vagrant box to install PostGIS/PostgreSQL/Geoserver so I can have something to point at plus it gives me a starting point for an upcoming class I’m in the middle of building. The vagrant box isn’t pretty – I expect to change it over the next bit as it’s mostly pieced together from a lot of other people’s work (Coleman McCormick, Dave Smith, etc). It works though and I have everything but pgadmin 4 running in one spot. Which – I don’t think this is anywhere near “install this for a server” because this is mostly just for talking, training, and testing.

So why vagrant? Why not docker? I can gloss over vagrant faster at theses talks than I can docker. I have 16 minutes to draw diagrams and about 4 minutes to publish one piece of data: QGIS -> PostGIS -> Geoserver -> Leaflet.

Anyway – if you’re up for the possibility of a train wreck of a presentation come by the East Tennessee Meeting in Kingsport next week as I try to explain how this works and hopefully you get excited enough to install some or all of these components and do something cool with your data.

The QGIS Class at TNGIC

So for those of you just tuning in (https://wp.me/p244MI-2nT), I did a QGIS 4 hour intro class at TNGIC. TNGIC is the State GIS group. They’ve been around a good while. I don’t really participate that much anymore. Why? Eh – There’s a few things I like doing and going to conferences doesn’t rate high anymore. I’m excited about FOSS4GNA because I get to see a lot of friends. Well – and the presentations. Mostly the people.

What happened – It was all pretty comical. Conferences are really just screw off time for a lot of people. This conference was at Montgomery Bell State Park. So you drive to Nashville, Head west for about 20 or so miles (maybe more) you end up in a pretty nice state park that has limited everything. 7 people signed up. By the time I gave everyone 15 minutes to get settled I had about 20 people in there. That set off a mad scramble to grab QGIS and follow along. We covered QGIS 3 in all it’s gory details – well as much gory detail as I could muster in 3.5 hours. There were questions. I had most of the answers. Three things stuck out at this event. Well – four.

I broke my first rule of training in that “I’m not doing it for free”. We bartered and they paid for a room. So I had the chance to ride my bike and goof off a bit as I didn’t have great internet access. I worked a little that night. Did some pretty cool things I’ll talk about coming up. Plus hand out business cards. So overall – I’m OK with this.
One guy walked up and went “you’re the website guy – with the tutorials?” and I said “probably”. Turns out he had been using them to get some much needed work down using QGIS. I had helped someone without even knowing. Which – made me take a hard look at the tutorial pages and realized I need to do something to make them easier to manage. They are behind – still useful but behind.
A park ranger snuck into the class. We started talking and turns out he needed GIS help – as in he had to share with the entire state about 10 ArcGIS licenses. So we started looking at what he needed done vs what he was doing. 100% can be done with QGIS. Most of their data is stored locally. So that was a win. Hopefully he emails with more questions. I’m all for people becoming self sufficient.

I make a decent living off the FOSS4G and my 26 years of being in the Geospatial Industry. These days I mostly try to focus on the data for work and really only get passionate about software during classes. I generally pitch QGIS as “another Tool in the Tool Box”. So part 4:

If you bought arcview and hate it – there’s no reason to stick with it. QGIS is better than an Arcview license. I ran into a few that just went “Well we already bought ESRI <fill in the blank> and we’re stuck”. Well – no you aren’t. Don’t get rid of it – just add to the tool set. It isn’t all or nothing these days.
Twenty six years ago we struggled to get and maintain data. Flash forward to 2018 and there are still people struggling to get and maintain data.
People in the class looked at QGIS similar to a software company. Do they make a “collector type of app”? Well no – this isn’t a company it’s a group of people. There are some mobile apps like this, that, and the other thing but it’s not a software company. QGIS grows as the community grows. Which caused me to play with QFIELD that night. It’s a mobile data collection app from the QGIS side of life.

So I’m adjusting the class. The first time I taught this class people had questions and problems. There are still questions and problems but it’s morphed into a more advanced line of thought. Can I get the data out into the field? My AutoCAD package can pull in spatialite…can I work in Spatialite? Those weren’t questions from 5 years ago. So I need to update and adjust. It’s a good thing – it’s been over a year or two since I’ve taught this large of a group and fielded questions.

Next outing is in St Loius at FOSS4GNA.

East TN Regional TNGIC Conference – September 22 2015 Kingsport TN

So if you are in the area and you haven’t been – you should go to the best biggest smallest regional GIS conference in September. Luckily this conference drifts back up to Kingsport Tn where there is always a good showing. Will the suits show up from NASA? Will the 13 y.o. kid with the drone make an appearance? Will there be Moon Pies?

I’ll be there:

MARK YOUR CALENDARS!

2015 Eastern Regional TNGIC Conference will be held at the Eastman Lodge in Kingsport, TN on Tuesday September 22, 2015 with training sessions tentatively planned for Wednesday, September 23^rd.

We are tentatively planning a social gathering on Monday evening, September 21^st at one of the Eastman picnic shelters near the lodge. Details of social to be determined based on how many are interested in attending.

MORE DETAILS TO COME!

Thank you,

Amesha Whitt awhitt@johnsoncitytn.org and Joyce Pierson joyce.h.pierson@gmail.com Conference Co-Chairs