The QGIS International User Conference 2025 happened in Norrköping, Sweden from 2-3 June 2025. I have been to the previous conferences in 2024, 2023 and 2019 and always look forward to the annual event. The conference keeps getting bigger and this year it attracted a diverse audience of 300+ participants from around the globe.
This was also a special conference for me as I brought my family along. The event featured a range of social activities that welcomed families, allowing my wife and daughter to connect with the community in meaningful ways. The conference itself was hosted at Visualization Center C – a wonderful and inspiring space for science and exploration with many exhibits specifically designed for kids.
The Conference
The 2-day conference started with a plenary session in a beautiful opera theatre packed with all the attendees. The keynote talk was by Anders Ynnerman – who is the professor of scientific visualization and director of the visualization center where the conference was hosted. It was a really inspiring talk with many examples of scientific big data visualizations (space probes, AI models etc.) along with making public spaces for kids that leverage these technologies. We could draw many parallels between our work with geospatial data and the work that was presented.
QGIS.org project chair Marco Bernasocchi gave an update on the organization and the upcoming QGIS 4 release.
The most exciting bit for me and many other Mac users was the announcement of new notarized MacOS Packages that will land with QGIS 4.0. I use a Mac Mini as my main workstation and recommend it to all my students as it the most affordable computer that offers unmatched performance for the price. QGIS works well on MacOS, but the official installers are often packaged with older libraries and have annoying little bugs. Hoping the new system will make the experience much better for Mac users.
It has been a tradition for Kurt Menke to give a QGIS Feature Frenzy talk during the opening session and I always enjoy seeing all the new features in QGIS released in the past year.
A standout talk was on Trajectools: analyzing anything that moves by Anita Graser covering her journey on building tools to make analyzing spatio-temporal data easier. Lots of examples of unique challenges posed by temporal datasets and how they are solved with the Trajectools QGIS Plugin.
I also attended the workshop Teaching Projections in Classroom with the Help of QGIS by Vedran Stojnović. Projections are a tricky topic to teach and I wanted to learn how I can do a better job of conveying these concepts in my teaching. The workshop was an eye-opener. Vedran did a great job presenting the research of Prof Miljenko Lapaine that shows how most of the current teaching of projections is misleading and inaccurate. The main point was that “map projections are results of mathematical transformations of sphere (or ellipsoid) onto a planar surface – with no references to cylinders, cones, or any other auxiliary surfaces appear in these equations“. The resulting planar map can then be rolled as a cone or a cylinder if one wishes – but those shapes are not used for the projection itself. This was a totally new way of thinking about projections and sparked a good discussion among the attendees on how we can incorporate this into our teaching.
The workshop showed how we can use QGIS to create a custom projection and roll the resulting planar map into a conical hat. Vedran was kind enough to present a map projection hat and a custom globe created in QGIS my daughter to carry back. This is such a cool way to engage kids in discussion on mapping! I encourage you to check out his workshop materials linked from the talk page.
My Workshops
I delivered 2 workshops at the conference. Both were well attended and received good feedback from the participants.
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.
- QGIS Expressions Masterclass (Full Workshop + Video Recording)
- Building Your First QGIS Plugin (Full workshop)
Networking and Social Events
The visualization center featured an exhibit titled Visual City where many spatial data layers were projected onto a 3D-printed model of the city of Norrköping. This demo of various vector, raster, and real-time datasets being presented was the highlight for many people attending the conference and sparked many conversations on making geospatial data more accessible. I could capture a few videos of that showed some interesting demos. The one showing the progression of training of a deep-learning classification model was my favorite and helped visualize how a neural network learns and see the errors in context of real-world objects.
The conference had plenty of Fika (Swedish coffee breaks with sweet treats) for informal chats and long lunch breaks. I enjoyed meeting new people and learning about their work. There were social events in the evening where I could take my family along.
My daughter who is a fan of QGIS Easter Eggs was thrilled to be among the QGIS community. She was welcomed with so much love by the community and showered with gifts. It was truly a memorable experience for her and she will cherish it for lifetime.
What next?
The next QGIS conference will be hosted in Switzerland from in June 2026! Hoping to see you there!
Thank you for taking the time to describe this event. I have always wanted to attend one but haven’t and knowing everything that happens is a way to experience it vicariously thanks to you.
You are welcome. Hope you can make it to a future QGIS conference!