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The first QGIS hackfest from 19.-22. March 2009 was held at the Institut für Umweltplanung (Institute of Environmental Planning), Leibniz University of Hannover. The institute sponsored the venue, audiovisual equipment, kitchen facilities and internet access. We are extremely grateful to them for helping us to make the QGIS 2009 hackfest turn from a dream into a reality.
We would also like to thank the German OSGeo Chapter, FOSSGIS e.V. for sponsoring the hackfest with 500 Euros and to the many people who have donated sums large and small to the QGIS project.
The money from donations was put to very good use funding the travel of some of the participants of the hackfest. We would like to thank the virtual hackfest particpants present on IRC, the hackfest was all the better for having your comments, testing and insights.
Participants:
Carson Farmer, Martin Dobias, Borys Jurgiel, Werner Macho, Dr. Horst Düster, Jürgen E. Fischer, Tim Sutton, Otto Dassau, Andreas Neumann and Dr. Marco Hugentobler who donated their time and energy to attend the hackfest and make it such a great occasion. Unfortunately Andreas Neumann and Marco Hugentobler are missing in the picture, because they couldn't attend the whole time.
Summary of what happened at the hackfest
Firstly we should mention, that the greatest part of the time was spent in discussions. Meeting face to face gives us an opportunity to discuss the minutae of the project in a way that is imply not possible in our virtual discussions. The discussions also gave us a good chance to plan what should be the priorities for the next major release of QGIS (Version 2.0) and the technical and logistical hurdles that need to be overcome in order to realise the QGIS 2.0 release. More details on that further down. We had 10 people attending (though not all could be here for the full duration). Here are some of the things they looked at:
- Horst Duester - looked at the German translation of the website, the establishment of a German QGIS mailing list and discussed with Martin Dobias the integration of his SQL Editor into the PostGIS manager.
- Martin Dobias - gave presentations of the work he and his group had been doing on QGIS Mapper project. He worked on bugfixing and integration of a new table class into trunk and helped with integration of the Plugin Installer into the Plugin Manager.
- Jürgen E. Fischer - fixed bugs and reviewed some out of SVN code he has. For Postgres he and Martin did performance testing and looked at places the performance can be improved. He also worked on OSGEO4W.
- Borys Jurgiel - added fixes and improvements to the Plugin Installer, updated themes to work on all plugins and completed Polish GUI translation.
- Otto Dassau - worked on the manual to separate it into a User Guide and a Coding and Installation Guide and did website and manual updates and German translations.
- Tim Sutton - Integrated a WMS search patch, fixed bugs, cleanups of the User Interface and helped Carson Farmer on the analysis branch.
- Carson Farmer - worked on the analysis branch and updates to QgsGeometry.
- Werner Macho - fixed bugs and worked on adding language support to the QGIS website. He updated the stable german GUI translation to 100% and wrote a script with Jürgen Fischer to automatically generate the translation progress status.
Experiences and plans for the next hackfest
The next hackfest is planned to be during the last week of October or the first week of November 2009. As a venue we proposed Prague, but this has to be investigated by Martin Dobias. For accomodation we aim to find a place where we can stay and hack at the same locations. From our experiences of this hackfest we will need to get $500 USD funding per person attending.
We would like to also encourage non developers to join the meeting because it was extremely useful having them in Hannover and there are many hackfest activities they can contribute with including documentation cleanups, translations, giving inputs to the user interface and user interaction ideas. It would also be great to have a dedicated non-dev to do the blogging, media etc next time. Someone with a bit of media skills and a good eye for presentation would be great and the venue should provide again good internet bandwidth. Having ustream live video streaming was a great addition.
Further links
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