1^st Australian QGIS User group meeting

Location: Perth, Australia
Address: Kalis Bros -101 Oxford St,  Leederville WA 6007
Date: Thursday 15^th of March 2013
Sponsored by: Digital Mapping Solutions

Agenda: 

• 10.00am - Registration
• 10.20am - Welcome and  introduction: Chris Scott (Digital Mapping Solutions)
• 10.30am – Presentations
  • Jeremy Taylor: Mapping Projects with QGIS (City of Belmont)
  • Shane French: Custom Plugin Development (Department of Environment and Conservation)
  • Nathan Woodrow: All the New Cool Stuff in QGIS 2.0 (Digital Mapping Solutions)
• 12.00pm – Discussion
  • ECW’s vs GeoTiff’s in QGIS
  • Useful plugins?
  • Free discussion.
• 12.30pm - Lunch
• 1.30pm - Finish

Summary: 

This event marked the first Australian QGIS User group meeting. There were 47 Attendees from a wide range of disciplines. The speaker from the City of Belmont, presented a very interesting piece on using QGIS within his organisation to map tree coverage within the local government area and as a tool for creating different  style maps for event mapping. The core points from this talk were that QGIS was reliable with large datasets, quick, efficient and easy to use.  As well as this the speaker mentioned how straightforward it was to train people, who had  no GIS or mapping background,  the basics of the QGIS software.

The second presentation was a practical demonstration of developing a custom plugin to deliver spatial datasets to a large scale organisation. As a result this allowed for QGIS to become a portal for all staff to use and view data.

The final speaker, Nathan Woodrow, presented a piece on the new exciting features that are coming out in version 2.0. The improved User Interface developments along with ATLAS and SEXTANTE plugins being included as part of the version 2.0 install, were met with a lot of interest and discussion.

The final part of the event was a discussion forum mediated by Chris and Nathan from DMS. This generated some healthy debate around compatibility issues with the ECW compression format within QGIS. The attendees also discussed their favourite plugins and future directions within QGIS.