The QGIS International User Conference 2024 happened in Bratislava, Slovakia from 9-10 September 2024, followed by the Contributor Meeting from 11-13 September 2024. This is one of my favorite events of the year and I have been to the previous conferences in 2023 and 2019 as well. The conference keeps getting bigger and this year it attracted a diverse audience of 240 participants from around the globe. This was also my first time attending the contributor meeting and got to spend an extended time with the developers and the community.
The Conference
The 2-day workshop had a packed schedule with over 50 talks and 15 workshops spread across 6 rooms. The opening keynote was from QGIS PSC Vice-chair Anita Graser who talked about the the evolution of the project. This was a great overview for new users to know how such a large open-source project is managed and how they can participate. A crowd favorite was Kurt Menke‘s QGIS Feature Frenzy talk showing where he showed marquee features in newer QGIS versions.
From all the talks I attended, my favorites were Learn how to create user friendly layout templates by Mie Winstrup, Migration of mobile network management data from spreadsheets to QGIS and PostGIS by Immo Blecher and Procedural art with QGIS by Johannes Kröger. All the talks were recorded are now available on YouTube.
My Talk and Workshops
I was really excited to deliver my talk on QGIS Expressions: Hidden Gems and Unexpected Possibilities that showed some wild possibilities with QGIS expressions. The talk generated a lot of buzz and many good ideas on some practical applications.
I also conducted 2 workshops – both were well attended and got positive feedback. As usual, my workshops are publicly accessible and available on our OpenCourseWare website for anyone to follow along. You can check them out at the following links.
- Cloud Native Geospatial Workflows with QGIS (Full Workshop)
- Building Your First QGIS Plugin (Full workshop)
Contributor Meeting
The conference was followed by 3-days of Contributor Meeting. The contributor meetings are a way for the entire QGIS team to meet in-person and have open ended discussion and collaboration. The meetings are un-conference style with no pre-set agenda. There is food, wifi and a place for everyone to work. This was my first time at a contributor meeting along with many other first timers. Raymond Nijssen kicked-off the session by explaining how the meetings work and gave some ideas on projects that we can work on.
I chose to work on collecting images and screenshots for the new QGIS Website. I worked with the QGIS full stack developer Lova Andriarimalala to understand the specifications and how to contribute them to the website on GitHub. I was able to collect some really good images from Kurt Menke and Has van der Kwast, and Steve Kim, edited and formatted them to the websites specifications and filed a PR to have them added. They were accepted and glad to see them already live on the QGIS.org website. A small but useful contribution to the project!
Networking
A big part of the conference was making new connections and informal discussions. The conference had a plenty of opportunities to engage in the informal discussions – both structured and unstructured. I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to meet fellow QGIS trainers Kurt Menke and Hans van der Kwast to discuss best practices. One thing I love about the QGIS community is that we do not see each other as competitors but collaborators who are always open to share ideas.
On the first day, there was a conference dinner organized at a boat on the river Danube. There was a fun quiz where over 20 teams participated. Our team The Three Continents – consisting of Kirsten Symczycz (Australia), Michał Drożdż (Poland) and Eric Meerburg (Netherlands) did very well and won the 2nd place.
The Team
The conference was organized by the Slovak QGIS User Group. This was one of the best-organized conferences I have attended – balancing structured and unstructured time – along with making sure the program ran smoothly. Thank you to the whole team for making it a memorable experience.
Exploring the city
The weather in Bratislava was perfect and I enjoyed visiting the local attractions – both historic and modern.
My favorite was a half-day hiking trip to the ruins of Devin Castle with amazing views of the confluence of the Danube and Moravia rivers.
What next?
If you work with QGIS, it is worth investing the time and money to attend this conference. The next QGIS conference will be hosted in Sweden from June 2-6, 2025. I hope to make it to next year as well and hope to see you there!
Great coverage of the UC
Is it ok if I use your group picture for blog.qgis.org? Or can you point me at the source of this picture? Thank you, Ujaval!
Hi Anita – of course. You may use any of the pictures from the post. The group photo was shared by Tomas M on the QGIS UC Whatsapp group. Others are all taken by me.
Great. Thank you, Ujaval
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