Getting Better with QGIS

We had the pleasure of hosting Kurt Menke of Bird’s Eye View GIS at Spatial Networks headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida, for a three-day QGIS training course. QGIS is our go-to “meat-and-potatoes” desktop GIS for a number of functions, and it made sense to get some formalized training to advance our skills as a company.

Fourteen staff members, representing a functional cross-section of the company, took part in a course that was a mix of hands-on work and demonstration. As a geography company, it is important to us that everyone be proficient in geography and geospatial tools, so we didn’t limit the class to only geospatial analysts. The attendees included the following disciplines:

• Information technology — Our IT Manager, in addition to having a latent love of maps, has to occasionally field trouble tickets related to QGIS. The hands-on work gave him greater insight into the software and, additionally, his work helping set up for the course gave him practice in deploying QGIS in our Macintosh environment.
• Software developers — Most of our software developers come to us without previous experience working with spatial data or methods. By getting some hands-on exposure to interactive spatial data handling and analysis, they get a better frame of reference for understanding how to break down and automate spatial tasks in our products.
• Product managers — Product managers guide the roadmap and development of our products. Similar to software developers, increased proficiency with a tool like QGIS gives them a better frame of reference to understand the potential inter-relationships and dependencies of enhancement requests related to spatial processing in order to better plan software releases.
• Customer support — Often, our support team fields calls from Fulcrum users who are also working with QGIS. While we don’t directly support QGIS, greater proficiency will help our support team work with those users and also give them more tools to work with spatial data in general as part of their support function.
• Executive leadership — Our CTO and our Vice President of Product Development also took part in the training. While they are far from being geospatial novices, they too learned new things about QGIS that will inform their strategic thinking.
• Geospatial analysts — Finally, our analyst team also took part. They are the audience one traditionally thinks of when considering this kind of training and they were the original impetus for it. They are also far from novices, but their previous experience and training have come from other “software traditions,” and they felt formal training could accelerate their proficiency with QGIS.

At the risk of starting a debate on semantics, I prefer to think of open-source software as “community-developed” software. Mature projects have a full community around them that extends well beyond the software development. Training, support, documentation, policy, and infrastructure all play a part in the successful use of open-source tools, just as they do in proprietary tools. In the open-source model, these functions are typically filled by a community of companies and individuals, rather than a single vendor. As a result, successful use of open-source tools requires active participation in that community. We’ve recently taken a few steps to increase our community participation and this training course is part of that.

Kurt Menke is a recognized leader in the QGIS community and engaging his services for training was the easiest such experience I’ve had in my geospatial career. Our team enjoyed the training and are excited about putting their new knowledge to work. They are already planning some blog posts, so watch this space as well as the Fulcrum blog.