Informal Survey of the Canadian QGIS Crowd?

QGIS QGIS CA
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Hello everyone!

Shoutout to the friend who texted me about this group. They messaged me about half an hour before the meeting started, I’m glad they did.

I think there were maybe 20 to 30 of us on the call today? Apart from my friend, you were all new faces to me. I had to leave partway through and may have missed something, but I think there was some ambiguity about the goals of the user group ? I know there was some talk of plugin development collaboration, but that isn’t quite my area.

A bit about me: I’m not a spatial specialist by trade. I come from an optimization background and have done research on the vehicle routing problem and project planning. I’ve used QGIS since 2014, mostly to visualize results from that optimization work, and I also use it for personal projects (a custom map makes a great gift!). My current day job involves less optimization and less spatial visualization, but I still use QGIS at work (not recently enough to see the banner).

I use QGIS partly to avoid needing another arc-license (especially given how little I use QGIS at work), partly because I value the FOSS community broadly.

I came today because I’m a map aficionado, I like tracking my adventures and seeing where I’ve explored. I came because I try to lean toward FOSS tools (for both cost and data sovereignty reasons), and I figured there might be some common ground here. I’d also like to learn about people who use QGIS in a professional capacity (public or private sector)? How did your company decide to go this route versus the other option?

I thought an informal survey might help give the group some direction, or at least where we’re coming from? Was wondering what brought you to the group? What motivated you to join today?

I feel like @jmckenna and @camilo were taking charge today? If you two think it’ll help, I’d be happy to try and compile the results for the next meeting, say, whatever is here by Nov 14th ish?

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Good thing to know who we are if we are to think about what we want !

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I like the idea of designing an informal (maybe anonymous) survey to have an idea of who we are now. Our geographic distribution would also be important in that survey.

Maybe trying to create a questionary for the next meeting? How to fill it? It can be published in our Linkeidn maybe and shared as a link in the QGIS.CA website? We could send new Linkedin members to that page when they enter the Linkedin group as well?

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Don’t we are map builders ? Let’s make a map of us :wink: (with privacy respect, of course)