I had a boss that would always start off with “So the Short story is….” and you’d be stuck for at least 30 minutes and maybe an hour listening to a story that didn’t go anywhere.
So the short story on the Mergin Maps Class……….
NRGS is a Mergin Maps partner. A little over a year ago I threw together a class and taught it at a local State level GIS meeting. Overall not my best class as I spent too much time going ‘THIS IS QGIS” and hardly anyone knew much about QGIS. It was a lot of explanation and not much time collecting data. After the conference I shelved the class and haven’t revisited it.
I’ve rolled out Mergin Maps for one client and we’ve spent an inordinate amount of time breaking things on purpose. The entire exercise has been a mix of what can we do, not do, and why does this work, and why doesn’t this work. Which has had me thinking about mobile data collection and Mergin Maps and QGIS. We’ve used DBsync with some success. We’ve taken pictures. We’ve joined data back to postgis database. I’m in the middle of writing a “check in” routine to clear up a few problems. It’s shown me that I had the process a bit wrong in the first class.
The class is getting “rewritten” to a degree with a more practical approach to the data collection portion. How will I do that? I’m going to spend half the class discussing QGIS. Once I get through that the rest of the time will be “collecting data”. We aren’t going to worry about all the fun of syncing data – just collecting and making that available to your users.
So with all that being said Training these days is a mixed bag. I’ve been doing a lot of training for conferences and I’ve been wedged in between “Avenue for the web” and “Arcpro works stop saying it doesn’t” classes. Virtual has been mostly dead as everyone has zoom fatigue. So I’m guessing this class will appear at a conference or something specific for an organization. Class will be approximately 4 hours in length…maybe 5. Anyway – stay tuned.
