For like of a better format I’m firing off what I hope is the first update of many. I am crossposting this to Discourse: QGIS US - OSGeo Discourse . I’ve not been super active up there but hopefully that’s about to change. The conversation moves there after this email.
To get us all up to speed since the QGIS BOF meeting in St Louis - things are moving slowly but starting to pick up the pace:
- I included everyone in the email as a “BCC”. You can out yourselves on Discourse if you wish.
- I did my best to die in December - Failed miserably so here I am. Little did I know I was in Heart Failure in St Louis.I’m consistently running behind these days also. So if you’ve emailed me and wondering where I am - hassle me again.
- One step that is probably going to have to be made is gaining some sort of non-profit status. Non-profit status would allow us to accept money and disperse money so if someone wanted to hold a meeting we might be able to help with food or space or something. Maybe pay for plugins that are US Centric. We aren’t covered by QGIS International’s non-profit status. I’ve been hassling OSM-US and OSGEO US about this. There is a chance one or the other could adopt us and we would sit under their Non-profit status. Nothing noteworthy on that as of yet but we will probably need to form a board etc. Then at some point we become a non-profit. I wouldn’t even worry about it BUT people have offered money in the past and I’m sitting here going “NO NO I don’t want to go to jail for tax evasion or whatever would happen”.
- With ESRI’s jump to named licensing I’m getting more questions from federalagencies on adopting QGIS. One of those questions from Federal being “Is there a VPAT for QGIS?”. In short - VPAT is the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template. Some federal agencies don’t require one (EPA). Some do (Forest Service). In some cases it shouldn’t really be QGIS’s headache BUT - against my better judgement I’m doing one and using an unnamed desktop GIS’s VPAT as a template. As I explained to the Agencies needing one you’ll get it when I get to it - OR - pay me and I’ll do it ASAP. So it’s not a terrible pain to do and Doug (Newcombe) is helping with that also. We’ll probably use what is done for QGIS and adapt it to GRASS. If you want to dive in and help lemme know.
That’s about it. If you have other people wanting to join in the noise point them to the link above discourse and hopefully I’ll have something in concrete before Reston VA. Who knows - maybe we have a virtual conference at some point…
Randy
Randal Hale
North Rivergeographic Systems, Inc